Any Street, In Another City. Photo: Daniel Arrhakis/Flickr.
By Fidel Narváez – Apr 28, 2025
What Occurred in the Second Round of Elections in Ecuador Resembles an Episode of Magical Realism, Devoid of Logical Explanation.
On Sunday 13 April 2025, the two finalist candidates, incumbent President Daniel Noboa and opposition candidate Luisa González, were tied with 44% of the votes each in the first round.
For the run-off, around 1,500,000 votes remained in dispute. Of these, the presidential candidate would have received nine out of ten votes, while the opposition candidate received only one.
No such phenomenon has ever been recorded in the history of democratic elections anywhere in the world, where one candidate garners virtually all the disputed votes. The statistical probability of such an outcome is practically nil, comparable to a coin landing on the same side in 90 out of a hundred tries. Any serious statistician knows this to be true. In fact, pundits are slowly emerging who are calling the election results an anomaly, unprecedented.
How is it possible that the opposition candidate received almost no votes, despite having formed an alliance with the candidate who came third in the first round, accumulating half a million votes? Moreover, she received the explicit support of other politicians, including former candidate Jan Topic, who in the 2023 won close to 1.5 million votes and was projected to finish third had he run in 2025.”
Until election day, all polls concurred that the race would be tight. In fact, most predicted a Luisa González victory. Of the two authorised exit polls, one gave González a 3.98-point lead, while the other projected a 2.4-point victory for the president. No polling firm has been able to explain the official results. Indeed, three subsequent polls have even estimated that the result should have been a narrow victory for González.
Just as in the fictional Macondo of “One hundred years of solitude”, where a ‘plague of insomnia’ made the population forget the meaning of things, on 13 April 2025 something sudden and mysterious seems to have affected Ecuadorians. A sort of ‘plague of hatred’ that, in a country polarised into two halves, made all undecided voters decide in the same way. According to this result, between the option that has turned the country into one of the most violent in the world and the one that made it the second safest in Latin America, nine out of ten undecided voters would have opted for violence.
Between the incompetence that has caused power cuts of up to 14 hours a day and the certainty that made Ecuador the fifth most energy-secure country in the world, nine out of ten would have opted for darkness. Between an economy in decline, with poverty, unemployment and emigration on the rise, and the experience that once doubled the size of the economy and was a global example of poverty reduction, strangely, nine out of ten would have preferred to insist on the status quo.
Elections can produce surprising results, but nothing explains this Ecuadorian election that defies statistics and will be the subject of worldwide study.
Not even the glaring inequality in the electoral field, comparable to a snow-capped peak in the Andes. It is estimated that the presidential candidate made available 5% of GDP in public money to offer all kinds of ‘bonuses’ in crass electoral clientelism. With the complicity of the electoral body, Daniel Noboa prevented the candidate with the greatest capacity to challenge him from participating in the election, while the entire state apparatus was used for campaigning, with an overwhelming official presence in the public and private media. For similar actions, international observers described the Venezuelan elections as ‘undemocratic’ for failing to meet ‘international standards of electoral integrity’.
In the Ecuadorian case, however, observers have been more lenient, applying double standards, despite pointing out irregularities such as the militarisation of the electoral process, the ban on taking photographs when voting, or the sudden change of polling stations in localities where the opposition candidate had the greatest preference.
Fraud in Ecuador: CNE Refuses to Recount Votes Despite Mounting Irregularities Allegations
A particularly worrying observation comes from the Organisation of American States (OAS): “At the time of closing and counting, both in the overseas voting and in the national territory, the Mission observed that the ink used to mark the ballots was transferred between the political options when folded, due to the symmetry of the design”.
The possibility of massive fraud using a technique known as ‘Inkswap’ may sound implausibly Macondian, let’s face it. But aren’t the official numbers, whose statistical probability of being accurate is less than 1%?
Candidate Luisa González has not yet acknowledged the election result.
She has every reason to demand a comprehensive forensic audit of the entire electoral process, with international assistance. The narrative that has taken hold in Ecuador with the acquiescence of the mainstream media describes her as a ‘sore loser’. However, without a thorough investigation to explain the implausible results, we will all have lost. The ‘plague of hatred’ will have blinded us to the point of forgetting the meaning of democracy.
