Ecuadorâs Democracy Should not be Derailed by False Claims of Election Fraud
By Mark Weisbrot – Feb 26, 2021
Like Trump, the loser in Ecuadorâs presidential election saw his early lead vanish as all the votes were counted
When Donald Trump began his final campaign to convince the American people and the world, or at least his supporters, that the U.S. election was stolen from him, he didnât get any help from most of the U.S. media. Most journalists hereâas well as the experts they rely uponâwanted to see some evidence. And none was forthcoming.
But the same standards donât always apply when âstop the stealâ becomes the rallying cry of election losers in other countries. As you read this now, a concerted effort is under way to discredit the Feb. 7 presidential election in Ecuador. As in the U.S., the political situation is polarized.
Andrés Arauz, an economist who served as a minister and director of the Central Bank in the prior (2007-2017) social democratic government of Rafael Correa, finished first. He will contest the April runoff election with second-place finisher Guillermo Lasso, a wealthy, conservative businessman and banker. Yaku Pérez, an indigenous lawyer, politician and activist, came in third and is therefore eliminated from the race.
Government Interference
The latest chapter, begun over the weekend, has the attorney general and comptroller general of the current government trying to seize âall digital content from the database that administers the electoral system.â The National Electoral Council (CNE) has rejected this.
Since the CNE is by law an independent authority, this interference by the attorney general and comptroller general is wholly in violation of Ecuadorâs laws and constitution. But itâs worse than that. As with Trumpâs defeat at the polls, there is no doubt about the outcome of the election. In this case, however, there is a government, aligned with some business interests and one of the losing candidates, that is trying to rob the population of its basic democratic rights.
RELATED CONTENT: Ecuador Elections: Arauz to Face Lasso in Second Round Under New Threats
That the government of President LenĂn Moreno would resort to such measures is no surprise to anyone familiar with his presidency. Two months ago, a letter from 13 members of the US Congress summed up Morenoâs anti-democratic governance, which far surpassed those of his most important ally, Donald Trump:
âOver the past few years, President Moreno and his allies have jailed and persecuted opponents, violently repressed protests and engaged in dubious maneuvers to try to prevent opposition leaders from participating in the countryâs February 2021 elections.â
But Moreno was unable to keep the countryâs largest opposition movement off the ballot, despite a series of illegal measures directed at doing exactly that.
The results
Arauz came in first with 32.72% of the vote, a 13 point margin over Guillermo Lasso (19.74%), with 19.39 percent for Yaku PĂ©rez. This despite a profound media bias against Arauz, combined with more last-minute illegalities by election authorities, such as banning images and the voice of the former President Correa in Arauzâs campaign advertising.
PĂ©rez cried fraud and demanded a recount. He has submitted no evidence of fraud. But his claims were aided by geographical optics of the vote count: for most of the week following the election, PĂ©rez maintained a lead over Lasso, and so he insisted he had won.
But anyone looking at the data could see that the areas remaining to be counted were decidedly more favorable to Lasso, and that PĂ©rezâs lead would vanish. It appears that PĂ©rez himself must have known this too; he is perhaps the first candidate ever to demand a recount while still in the lead among the votes counted.
In fact, a statistical projection made at 5:43 a.m. on the day after the election already showed that PĂ©rezâs chances of landing in second place were extremely close to zero; and that his mean projected margin of loss would be 0.37% (it ended up at 0.35%).
Admittedly, the conspiracy theory of the election losers in this caseâPĂ©rez and his newfound allies in the Moreno governmentâisnât all that clear about who did what to whom, or how, or for what reason, in order to cheat PĂ©rez out of a second-place finish. And logistically, itâs nearly impossible to even come up with a plausible theory of how it could have happened.
The Bolivian election
The same logistical impossibility and lack of evidence characterized claims of fraud in Boliviaâs October 2019 election. But there was prolonged repetition of these claims in the media, and support for the conspiracy theory from the Organization of American States Electoral Observation Mission, in conjunction with the Trump administration. The false claims in Bolivia thus led to a military coup shortly thereafter; and massacres of indigenous Bolivians by the coup government that had seized power. Today, most journalists familiar with the Bolivian election know that the charges of election fraud on which the coup was based were false.
In contrast to its reports on Bolivia, the OAS observer mission in Ecuador has rejected the current false charges of fraud, stating: âthe results show that, in the April 11 runoff, the candidates AndrĂ©s Arauz and Guillermo Lasso will compete for the presidency of the republic.â They also denounced the interference of the attorney general and comptroller general in the electoral process.
The right to free and democratic elections is a fundamental human right, and should not be so easily violated when there are unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. The same standards that most of the media, government officials, and experts applied to Trump should apply in all elections: show us the evidence.
Featured image: Andres Arauz was the winner of the first round in the presidential election in Ecuador. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mark Weisbrot
Mark Alan Weisbrot is an American economist and columnist. He is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.
