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Final Results Give Bolivia's Morales Outright Win in Disputed Election

VOA News

   Bolivia's electoral board has given incumbent Evo Morales an outright
   win in the country's presidential election.

   With almost all the votes counted, the board said Thursday that Morales
   had won 47.1% of the votes, compared with the 36.5% of his centrist
   rival, former president Carlos Mesa.

   A margin of at least 10 percentage points, according to Bolivian laws,
   is an outright victory and avoids a runoff.

   The Organization of American States, the European Union and Bolivia's
   Catholic Church have called for a runoff. The governments of Argentina,
   Brazil, Colombia and the United States have also called for a second
   round in the disputed election.

   Opposition lawmakers have accused the leftist leader of manipulating
   the results so he could avoid a runoff.

   Morales had said he would participate in a runoff vote if his margin of
   victory fell below 10 points.

   OAS election monitors said there were "irregularities" in the
   transmission of the results. They said there was a "hard to explain
   change" in the trend of the count, showing a dramatic shift toward
   Morales after initially being a tossup.

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