Mistakes happen. Sometimes you get a number wrong on a government form and are forced through rounds of emails and phone calls to fix the mistake; sometimes you uncritically trumpet false charges of electoral fraud and end up supporting a right-wing coup. We’re all human.

The latest whoopsie-daisy comes care of the New York Times, which recently reported on a new study debunking the central plank of the charges of electoral fraud lobbed at ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales in last year’s election. To recap, in last year’s election, the long-serving Morales looked like he might be forced into a perilous run-off as results trickled in, only at the last minute to jump ahead of the ten-point threshold needed to avoid one. It was this sudden leap that was deemed “inexplicable” by the Organization of American States (OAS), and was widely heralded as evidence Morales had stolen the election.

The new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University, finds the precise opposite: that not only was Morales’s sudden change in electoral fortunes entirely explicable, but was in line with trends in earlier elections in Brazil, Colombia, and even Bolivia itself, which the OAS had signed off on. In fact, it also matches up with something American liberals are far more familiar with: US elections and the Democratic vote.

“Researchers understand why late-counted votes disproportionately favor the Democrats in the United States: young and nonwhite voters are more likely to cast mail-in and provisional ballots, which are more likely to be counted after election day,” the authors write. “While politicians and pundits often point to the blue shift as evidence of fraud, scholars find that it is predictable. In Bolivia, too, compositional changes likely explain the shift in late-counted votes.”

The study may be new, but the conclusions aren’t. Researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research had similarly argued at the time that Morales’s eleventh-hour vote surge was wholly predictable given that later-reporting areas had tended to favor him in previous elections. Likewise, in February of this year, two MIT researchers also disputed the OAS’ claim that Morales’ late-game fortune was a statistical irregularity.

You would think, given the worldwide official consternation at the prospect of a fourth Morales term allegedly secured through elections shenanigans, this would be big news. At the time, outlets including but not limited to the Times, the Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times, NPR, and the Associated Press all heavily suggested Morales — a “strongman,” as the Times briefly labelled him in a political Freudian slip — had overturned democracy. All pointed to Morales’s nick-of-time vote boost, cited the OAS’ statement, as well as an expression of alarm by the European Union. Some didn’t even bother to imply.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that Evo is brazenly trying to steal the election to avoid a runoff that he might well lose,” the Post quoted from the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank funded by virtually every malign corporate interest under the sun, as well as USAID, a “democracy promotion” instrument of the US government with a history of sometimes violent meddling in foreign countries, which Morales expelled from Bolivia in 2013.

“To new age leftists like Morales, elections are like buses: they ride them until they get where they want to go, and they get off,” wrote the right-wing American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Noriega, outright accusing Morales of “stealing” the election.

With media and other international pressure lending legitimacy to the right-wing revolt against his government, Morales actually pledged a do-over of the election. Instead, the military told him to leave and Morales fled the country before armed intruders invaded his house.