Ecuador already has final results from the first round of the presidential election, but the problems surrounding the electoral process are not over yet. In the early hours of Sunday, two weeks after election day on February 7, the National Electoral Council made official the two winners who will go to the tiebreaker. Andrés Arauz, the candidate of the Union for Hope alliance sponsored by Rafael Correa, will contest the Andean presidency on April 11 against conservative CREO-PSC politician Guillermo Lasso. Arauz won the support of more than three million voters and Lasso of 1.8 million. Finally, Pachakutik’s indigenous leader Yaku Pérez, who competed with CREO for second place, was dropped by just 32,600 votes in an election that saw more than 11 million Ecuadorians go to the polls.
The CNE awards 1,830,045 votes to Guillermo Lasso compared to the 1,797,445 Pérez has obtained, who has announced that he will challenge the results that keep him out of the presidential race before the Electoral Controversious Tribunal. The indigenous candidate has insisted that a ‘fraud’ has been committed, an expected response, but one that reflects the tension and blame of the past 15 days among those contesting the pass to the perception of the cut. Guillermo Lasso, the second with the most votes, issued a similar warning about the “intervention of foreign authorities” and about the partial withdrawal of police guards at CNE headquarters. Sunday arrived in Ecuador with complaints and concerns from the two winners and the election board itself over requests from the prosecution and the auditor’s office to immediately check the computer system used to process the results.
Hours before the CNE Plenary Session, in which the challenges posed by the political movements were to be analyzed and resolved, before the results were announced, the Comptroller’s Office sent a statement requesting permission to access the computer equipment to transparency of the process and prepare a report within 20 days. That request, according to the letter signed by the Controller General, Pablo Celi, was motivated by “various complaints from citizens”, without giving further details, and should be submitted “before the second round of elections”.
At the same time, Attorney General Diana Salazar made a similar request to be executed this Sunday at 7:30 a.m., just five hours after the results of the first round were announced. In this case, the public prosecutor’s office orders the removal of the database of the computer server located in the facilities of CNE as part of an investigation into the transparency of the elections. According to the letter, the intention is to collect information about the users who have accessed the system and to confirm the correctness of the annotation of results in the minutes of the Guayas Province, the area that turned on the last moment to the first advantage the native candidate had over the CREO politician.
CNE President Diana Atamaint rejected requests from the Public Prosecution Service and the Controller’s Office, citing article 16 of the Code of Democracy on Twitter, which prohibits the direct or indirect interference from any authority “outside the electoral organization. “in relation to the process itself or to the body organizing the elections.
Lawyers for the candidacy of Andrés Arauz, of the Union for Hope, went to the Electoral Controversious Tribunal in Quito early on Sunday to file complaints against the Public Prosecution Service and the Auditor’s Office for their involvement in the election process, and Arauz issued a round press release in which he described holding the second round as a “threat” to the computer system’s audit requirements. “If they want to overhaul transparency, they don’t have to pull the teams back,” said the candidate bringing the correista option together. “A manipulation of the judiciary and the electoral system must not justify an extension of Lenín Moreno’s government,” he complained. In his opinion, the maneuvers of the two control entities would delay the holding of the second round of elections, despite the fact that the Comptroller’s Office considered that the audit process should not take longer than 20 days and the Public Prosecutor’s Office set a deadline. proposed of 10 days to present your expert report.