In Today’s Ethiopia, Numbers Have Lost Their Meaning

Via Jonathan Chait, this prison humor:

A man is sent to prison for the first time. At night, the lights in the cell block are turned off, and his cellmate goes over to the bars and yells, “Number twelve!” The whole cell block breaks out laughing. A few minutes later, somebody else in the cell block yells, “Number four!” Again, the whole cell bloock breaks out laughing.

The new guy asks his cellmate what’s going on. “Well,” says the older prisoner, “we’ve all been in this here prison for so long, we all know the same jokes. So we just yell out the number instead of saying the whole joke.”

So the new guy walks up to the bars and yells, “Number six!” There was dead silence in the cell block. He asks the older prisoner, “What’s wrong? Why didn’t I get any laughs?”

“Well,” said the older man, “sometimes it’s not the joke, but how you tell it.”

The final European Union Election Observation Mission to Ethiopia 2010 released today tells the joke that was the 2010 elections rather well. What caught my eye while skimming through this 38-page report was the devastating smack down of the ballot and vote tallying process. In the preliminary report, the mission mainly focused on the lack of level playing field in the competition. But that, as I concluded in my post-election blog, was not the only story. Some from the report:

In 27% of cases observed by the EU EOM, polling station results were not the same as those previously recorded. In a number of cases, incorrect or incomplete forms from polling stations were corrected or completed at constituency offices, thereby removing a key element to crosscheck the accuracy of figures.

………

The Mission compared a sample of poling station and constituency results collected by EU observers, with the results received by the NEBE headquarters, and found that the number of valid votes were generally consistent, even if there were minor differences in some cases. However, the recorded figures for invalid and unused ballots were extremely inconsistent. EU EOM observers’ records of polling station tallies for valid and invalid votes and unused ballots varied in 60% of cases (77 out of 129 cases), often by several hundred. There was no pattern as to which figures increased or decreased. At constituency level, there were minor differences in vote tallies for the various candidates but frequent and significant differences in figures for ballot tallies. These were different in 64% of cases and varied by several thousand in a number of cases.

We can not be sure about the extent of these sorts of problems and whether they would have substantially changed election results. That needs a systematic examination of the different data at the polling stations, constituency level and NEBE headquarters. It is reasonable to assume that this investigation won’t take place anytime soon. This much though we can say: Given the flagrant tampering with almost all national data, in today’s Ethiopia numbers have no meaning. In politics or economics!

After noticing the level to which the integrity of the country’s budget system was compromised, Paddy Ashdown, the man who worked as the international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, concluded that what Bosnia needed were not doctors without borders, but accountants without borders. A post-Meles government should hope that the first help it gets is from statisticians without borders to clean the statistical mess we are in.