Eduardo González
The Plurinational Parliamentary Group, Sumar, the minority party in Pedro Sánchez’s coalition government, has expressed its “serious suspicions of fraud” in Ecuador’s recent presidential elections, which gave victory to President Daniel Noboa. In response, the government has insisted, based on reports from the OAS and the EU, that the process “was conducted transparently, with sufficient guarantees to reflect the will of the electorate.”
With a voter turnout of nearly 84 percent, Noboa won the second round of the presidential elections on April 13 with 56 percent of the vote, allowing him to remain in office in 2023. His rival, the Correísta Luisa González Haya, who obtained 44 percent of the votes, denounced electoral fraud. The elections took place after Noboa declared a state of emergency and amid a climate of violence and polarization.
In a written parliamentary question filed in Congress on May 12 by Enrique Santiago and other Sumar deputies, the party led by Second Vice President Yolanda Díaz asserts that “an expert study by the Canary Islands Institute of Criminological Analysis (ICAC) confirms the theory of alleged fraud in Ecuador’s recent runoff election, based on an ink transfer on the ballots in favor of the re-elected president, Daniel Noboa, over the candidate Luisa González.”
According to Sumar, prior to the report, Ecuador had already warned of the possibility that the ballots had “contained a chemical compound on one half so that González’s votes would pass into the space assigned to Noboa when they were folded before being placed in the ballot boxes.”
Likewise, the preliminary observation report from the Organization of American States (OAS) indicated that, in some cases, “ballots had been detected where the ink from the ballot had marked the spaces assigned to the candidates when the paper was folded, which had caused confusion during the counting process.” “The OAS, however, did not give these incidents significant importance,” Sumar continued.
The Document Analysis Expert Report, prepared by Óscar Francisco Díaz-Santana, a criminologist specializing in ink analysis from the ICAC (Central American Institute of Statistics and Census), based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, states that there is “evidence that a highly transferable ink was used that could mark the boxes of both candidates, which could undermine the electoral counting process, all of which was facilitated by the design of the ballots.”
Separately, the Citizen Revolution party, led by candidate González, stated in a statement that “two types of ballpoint pens were found distributed by the National Electoral Council (CNE) to the Voting Boards, something that had not occurred in previous elections and which increases the hypothesis of fraud.”
“The ICAC report concludes that the vulnerabilities found compromise the integrity of the counting process and could constitute a serious attack on the democratic will of the Ecuadorian people,” Sumar concludes, asking the government if it “is aware of the ICAC report” and, if so, “what its assessment is of it.”
It also asks “what the government’s assessment is of the recognition of an election result with serious suspicions of fraud, as is the case in the recent Ecuadorian elections, and whether it will act or intercede with the relevant agencies to clarify the suspicions and doubts raised regarding possible chemical compounds in the ballots used in the aforementioned elections.”
Government response
In its response, filed on June 16 and published this week by the Official Gazette of the Cortes Generales (BOCG), the Government asserts that it “has closely followed the development of the electoral process in the Republic of Ecuador and has taken into account the reports issued by the Electoral Observation Missions of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU), present in the country during election day.”
“Both missions agreed that the process was conducted transparently, with sufficient guarantees to reflect the will of the electorate, despite some minor incidents, which did not compromise the integrity of the final result,” it continues. “In any case, we hope that the recommendations for improvement contained in the aforementioned reports will be taken into account for future electoral processes,” it adds.
The day after the elections, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs congratulated Daniel Noboa on his victory in the second round of the presidential elections, “as well as the Ecuadorian people for their democratic participation in the second round of elections.” “Spain celebrates the peaceful conduct” of the electoral process, “which included the presence of international observation missions and demonstrated the civic commitment of Ecuadorian citizens to democracy,” it continued.
