You're absolutely right. The MWE I made had a nasty typo that blew
everything up! I'm sorry for the noise.

The information in the manual still looks misleading to me:

#+BEGIN_EXPORT ascii
All lines in this block will appear only when using this back-end.
#+END_EXPORT

(Taken from "12.7 ASCII/Latin-1/UTF-8 export")

This doesn't seem to be related to verbatim text.

2017-02-09 19:19 GMT+00:00 Charles C. Berry <ccberry@ucsd.edu>:

> On Thu, 9 Feb 2017, Vicente Vera wrote:
>
> Hello. This discussion
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2017-02/msg00163.html
>> points out that Org tables are converted to HTML tables when exporting
>> through "ox-md". Leaving Markdown-related issues aside, I've stumbled
>> upon this problem a while back.
>>
>> It is suggested that wrapping the table within a "#+(BEGIN|END)_EXPORT
>> md" should leave it as-is in the exported document but that is not the
>> case. The table gets converted to HTML anyway.
>>
>>
> Not in recent versions of org. Here is an example of a table that is
> exported as a table without any html-ization:
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :results raw
>   (org-export-string-as
>    "
>   ,#+begin_export md
>   | a |
>   | b |
>   ,#+end_export"
>    'md t)
>
> #+END_SRC
>
> #+RESULTS:
> | a |
> | b |
>
>
> Of course, the comma escapes are stripped before `org-export-string-as'
> sees the string.
>
> HTH,
>
> Chuck
>