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