Our post “Las elecciones 2023 en Ecuador: La Gran Sorpresa, La Gran Mentira y la Hipótesis sucia” presented a number of probative indicators that a fraud took place in the August 20, 2023 presidential election.
The numbers suggest that “The Big Surprise” – Daniel Noboa´s gigantic leap from less than 7% in 21 independent polls to 23% in 11 days – may have been the result of fraud conducted by the CNE, the pro-Correista government agency that manages Ecuadorian elections.
Summary OF The Dirty Hypthoses: by taking votes from other candidate, the CNE substituted Daniel Noboa for Christian Zurita for second place, allowing Noboa to participate in the runoff election of October 15 which he won.
The Correistas viewed Noboa as a greenhorn, easily to manipulate - far preferable to Christian Zurita, their archenemy.
Our post generated a lot of heat. People wanted to know the mechanics behind the curtain. If there was a fraud, how was it perpetrated? This post examines that subject.
PART 1
To understand the Ecuadorian elections coming next year, let´s begin at the end - the elections that took place August 20th 2023.
An intriguing article about the elections, “Cómo hicieron el fraude electoral in Patria Nostra?” (“How did they commit electoral fraud in our Country?” ), was written by historian and lawyer Diego Demetrio Orellana.
His core argument: the number of registered voters is inflated by approximately 1,700,000 “ghosts.” He takes the election of 2017 to make his case:
(i) There were 12.8 million registered voters.
(ii) The population of Ecuador was 16.4 million.
(iii) The amount of registered voters is extraordinarily high given the total population.
Bringing the numbers up to date, let´s see if he´s right.
1. The population of Ecuador in 2024 is 18,648,110.
2. Registered voters totaled 13,162,339 in August 2023.
3. The total population count should be adjusted to exclude people under 16 years of age who are ineligible to register to vote.
Ecuador population aged 15-64 = 11,105,406.
To that number must be added people aged 65 and over. 1,520,590. They are eligible to vote but legally are not required to do so. We will include all of them. 11,105,406 + 1,520,590 = 12,625,996.
From that number 15-year-olds must be subtracted; they are not eligible to vote. My ballpark estimate: 305,867.
4. Grand total of Ecuadorians 16 years old+ eligible to register to vote: 12,320,129.
5. Conclusion: 12,320,129 million people eligible to register to vote versus 13.162,339 million registered voters! Diego Orellana is right: the number of registered voters is huge – obviously, indisputably inflated.
There are numerous ways that inflation could occur. The most common one is to not purge deceased voters.
How many dead people are among Ecuador´s registered voters? Are there 1.7 million deceased people – Diego Orellana´s estimate of ghost voters - on Ecuador´s registered voter roll?
To satisfactorily answer that question, a Ph.D. dissertation is called for. The latest information in the Civil Registry where the vast majority of Ecuadorians are registered would be compared to the roll of registered voters created and maintained by the CNE, the agency in charge of elections. Someone who died in 1990, for example, could still be listed among registered voters but would be missing from the latest Civil Registry roll. The CNE could then purge that person from the registered voters. We will show in a moment that not only is that type of interagency co-ordination possible, it is already taking place.
There are a number of ways to purge deceased persons on registered voter rolls. Many states conduct an automatic purge of individuals who do not vote in one or more elections. This may not be sufficient, however, in that dead people have been known to “vote” hence they would remain on the registered voter roll; for an explanation of that “miracle”, see below.
In Ecuador, a total purge following a predesignated national election would be one option. The registered voter roll would then be constructed entirely anew with the latest information in the Civil Registry.
A purge could also be performed automatically every 10 years or so. American states do it as a matter of course.
In the United States, voting is not required. Ecuador has obligatory voting, and registered voters who do not vote are fined. Exemptions: people aged 16-18, people aged 65+, citizens living abroad, and other (small) groups for whom voting is optional. An Ecuadorian purge, then, would require very close coordination with the Civil Registry. Again, such coordination already exists, i.e., Ecuadorians who turn 16 years of age – they are in the Civil Registry - are automatically put on the registered voter roll. No action is required on their part.
PART 2
The CNE is aware of the dead registered voter issue.
The CNE closed and locked the registered voter roll on July 27, 2022. Locked means no changes were possible, including the purging of dead people. Local elections were held in Ecuador on February 5, 2023, using that voter roll. That same roll was used 6 months later in the August 20, 2023 election.
Because the roll was locked, it was not possible to purge people who died between July 27, 2022 (when the roll was locked) and July 3, 2023, when ballots were printed for the following month´s election. Result: for the August election, the CNE printed ballots with the names of those deceased people in grey with the notation that they could not vote. 71,698 names were thus marked as ineligible.
Which entirely begs the question…
What about all people who died BEFORE the roll was locked in 2022? People who died in 1990? 2011? but remained on the register voter roll? They could comprise a gigantic group – over a million, according to Diego Orellana.
There are two other suspicious items:
(i) The number of printed ballots delivered to the local voting boards was not reduced by the number of identified dead people on the voter rolls. 350 ballots are sent to each board regardless of how many registered voters are marked in grey. Make no mistake: this allows for cheating without the muss and fuss of falsifying signatures (see below).
Let´s say a precinct has 350 people on the roll, 50 of whom are deceased, marked in grey; 350 votes can still be cast; the paper ballots are there. Only if the number of ballots delivered to a precinct matches the number of real live eligible voters can this open door to fraud be closed.
To be sure, a manual, paper ballot count compared to the CNE count would reveal a fraud of that type. But would the revelation make any difference? We discuss a supercilious so-what-who-cares? response in PART 4.
(ii) We come to the suspicious item cum laude. The CNE claims it went to the trouble of identifying deceased voters in grey in order to eliminate the possibility that someone could show up at the poll, pretend to be the dead person, sign the roster and vote.
To steal an election in that fashion is extremely unlikely. For starters, the impersonator would have to have a national identity card – it has a picture – of the dead person to present to the election officials. So tedious, so easily discovered, is this scam that I know of no place in the world where it changed an election outcome - especially when there are simpler means of accomplishing that end.
The CNE´s fear of the impersonator scam may be worthy of the award for Red Herring of the Year, if not the Decade. Which raises a question:
PART 3
Why complain about inflated voter registration rolls? What harm can dead registered voters possibly do?
To ask those questions is to ask another: if deceased voters in fact do nothing, why would there be resistance on the part of anybody – including the CNE - to removing them from the voter roll?
In the pre-computer days, when voting was done entirely by paper ballots, there were various methods for rigging elections. Destroying or “losing” ballots was the most common “negative” practice. The most common “positive” practice was the “Night Crew” system. To wit:
The polls close at 8:00 p.m. The remaining voters vote, leave the premises. The officials lock the doors.
A crew takes its assigned places. Bottle of Jack Daniels and Marsh Wheeling cigars optional. The crew opens the first voter roster – the document with your pre-printed name that you sign immediately before you vote. The crew has no interest in the people who signed their names and voted; it focuses instead on people who did not sign in.
Let s assume registered Voter #1 did not sign in. A crew member signs Voter#1´s name in the blank space beside Voter #1´s printed name, signals to another crew member in the voting booth who pulls the lever/makes the mark for the favored candidate.
In a crude system there are only a few crew members signing names per roster; the problem is that it doesn´t take a signature expert to spot what happened. A more sophisticated system employs five or more signers per roster. An expert can still detect what happened, but it takes more time and effort – and money.
There is a giveaway when election night crews are at work – literally, a dead one. When the crew member signed Voter #1´s name he did not know…the voter died two months ago. Now you know how dead people vote. Whenever and wherever that happens, a gigantic red flag is raised that a night crew was present.
Obviously, falsifying signatures and “voting” registered voters who did not vote takes time. That fact explains some of those “inexplicable delays” on election night of vote returns coming in from such and such city or county.
The night crew technique is used only when elections are close. To sign in and vote 500,000 voters, for example, would require a crew of many, many people over many, many precincts. Somebody would talk and the entire conspiracy would unceremoniously blow up in the perpetrators´ faces. It hasn´t happened yet, and probably never will.
The “beauty” of the crew technique is that at the end of the evening the number of people who signed in and the total votes cast in a precinct match. Nothing suspicious appears, at least superficially.
Now that I have explained the underlying dynamic, I turn to the partly-computerized elections in Ecuador. Actual voting is done – fortunately so – on paper ballots which are stuffed in boxes. After the polls close, the ballots are hand counted along with the results for each candidate. My experience has been that there are so many people involved, it would be extremely difficult to perpetuate any significant fraud at that level. The famed “international observers” who stand around and watch college students processing ballots are not going to see much, if any, chicanery.
There is, however, another level.
The hand-counted precinct totals are forwarded to the CNE for computerized tabulation. As Shakespeare would say, there´s the rub.
Reports are already emerging about big discrepancies between hand counted ballot totals and the CNE official totals in the August 20th election. For a report, click here: https://www.ecuavisa.com/noticias/politica/elecciones-ecuador-2023-defiende-tu-voto-denuncia-inconsistencias-AL5962552.
For another report: https://www.tiktok.com/@jetpilder/video/7278149439871536390?q=jetpilder%2C%20CNE&t=1706718834583
What could have happened: corrupt officials at the CNE rigged the computer tabulation process.
One technique: put a Trojan horse in the software. The horse transfers, say, every fifth vote for candidate A in column 1 to candidate B in column 2, until the desired totals are achieved. The horse then waves good-bye and vanishes forever into cyberspace. There is no electronic proof anywhere that something illegal transpired. That, dear reader, is the textbook definition of a perfect crime.
Of course any crooked computer tabulation in Ecuador cannot alter the fact that hard, tangible, paper ballots exist. The latter are what can give the game away.
Sidebar: If the famed “international observers” are not allowed to enter the room where the computer tabulation Is performed or are prohibited from otherwise inspecting the computerization process in full – notably, examine the software BEFORE and after the election - they should immediately cancel their participation. Walk out rather than unwittingly serve to legitimize an illegitimate process.
In the elections that took place in August 2023, for the first time Ecuadorians living abroad (1.5 million people) - voted via computers. Alas, the system apparently broke down and their votes were thrown out. Those Ecuadorians voted again on October 15 in a repeat of the pre-runoff election of August 20th; needless to say, that election alternative is totally unacceptable.
The botched foreign vote may have been a trial run to see first, how the public and judicial system would react if at all; second, to test a certain computer platform to see if it “worked.” Or, were the CNE officials watching the votes come in from abroad, murmured a despondent oh-no, and declared a “technical failure” to keep those votes from being counted? The ridiculous nullification raises those questions – and others. Most notably, if the CNE is innocent, why is it behaving as if it were guilty.
Sidebar: If cornered, corrupt officials will typically plead incompetence.
Corruption/incompetence: corrupt officials are forever confusing them, hoping the indecipherable mixture will make us throw up our hands in frustration and dissuade us from pursuing the matter. With a sly cackle in their bourbon and coke, they prefer being written off as stupid to going to prison.
O.K., in the end, was the “technical failure” of the foreign vote count on August 20th corruption or incompetence? Give up? My final judgment formed after observing that guessing game across several decades:
Corruption or incompetence, it makes no difference.
PART 4
It is no doubt surprising to many readers that for the August 20th election the CNE did not make a minimal effort to cover discrepancies between its computer tabulation and the hand counts of paper ballots. In precinct A, for example, they could have forged 200 signatures and attributed the 200 votes to Candidate 1. No voter-votes count discrepancy would have occurred.
If corruption in fact took place in the August election, the absence of a signature crew would suggest a high level of arrogance. Hells-bells, everybody knows Ecuadorian elections are fixed, so what? Our candidate will be president; that´s all that matters. People can whine all they want; nothing will come of it.
Such reasoning has a basis. In 2017, Lenin Moreno defeated Guillermo Lasso for president is an election which, frankly, stank to high heaven. Being a political neophyte, Lasso did nothing whatsoever about being robbed of the highest post in the land. He thus unwittingly aided and abetted in practice the very thing he so resoundingly condemned verbally.
A run-off election for president was held in Ecuador October 15th between Luisa González (Correista) and Daniel Noboa. I have researched past elections and demographic data. Simply put: there is no way Luisa González could win the election legally given the type of campaign she was waging; the votes were simply not there.
Caveat: sometimes, it is too late to win. But it is never too late to lose. González could not win the election legally; however, Noboa could have lost by not running an effective campaign. He definitely had problems; he engaged in neophyte practices that sapped him of momentum.
The 2023 race is of course over and done with. Mentioning it, however, it by no means kicking a dead horse. González is saying she wants to run again, in 2025. And so, the same basic scenario exists. If she wins, it will be close, e.g., 50.5%-49.5%. In that case, I would strongly urge her opponent to do what Lasso failed to do: challenge the election in court.
The starting place: precincts which show a significantly higher than average percentage vote for González coupled with a significantly higher than average turnout percentage (for the August 20, 2023 election, the turnout was 78%.) With the aid of the Civil Registry, look for deceased people who voted and were not greyed out by the CNE on the registered voter rosters. For extremely suspicious precincts where González received, say, over 80% of the vote and the turnout was 90% or higher, hire a handwriting expert to examine the signatures.
There are other investigative procedures which should be put in place if González wins. I will not elaborate on them here.
CONCLUSION
I noted that González could not win a runoff election legally. The numbers are not there. Why?
In the presidential election of 2021, Andrés Arauz, the Correista candidate, won the first election with 33% of the vote. Guillermo Lasso came in second with 20%. Since no candidate received 40%, there was a run-off election. Lasso defeated Arauz, 52%-48%, by 400,000 votes.
In the first presidential election of August 2023, Luisa González, the Correista candidate, won with 34% of the vote. Daniel Noboa came in second with 23%.
Noboa was ahead of Lasso not only in % terms but also absolute votes – 500,000. For her part, González ran ahead of Arauz, 34% versus 33%, with 300,000 additional votes.
Comparing 2021 and 2023, then, a small advantage for the October runoff election went to Noboa. The tracks were laid down for a 53%-47% victory for him. He won by only 51.8% due to a mediocre campaign.
The essential dilemma facing the Correistas leaps into view: their base is large enough to win the first election (33%) but not large enough to win a run-off. The underlying problem: everybody (with one exception) in Ecuador knows who Rafael Correa is. They either like him or hate him. There is not room for much movement up or down.
The advisors of Luisa González apparently were aware of the above reality. That is why they focused on the exception noted above: young people. There are 3 million persons aged 15-24 in Ecuador. They are too young to have strong opinions about Rafael Correa one way or another.
It is understandable the 3-million head count caused sugar plums to dance in Correista heads. There are, however, two major obstacles:
First, young people traditionally do not split decisively one way or another. Although there usually are age cohort differences, young people tend to vote along the same lines as other voters. In order to win them over in large enough numbers to win the October election, Luisa González had to run a much different campaign.
Second, young people have low voting turnout rates. Even if Luisa González were winning a huge percentage of them, she would need to get them to the polls on election day. And that, as Cantinflas would say, is where the detail is…
As noted, voting in Ecuador is obligatory. There is no need to mount a special effort to get people to go to the polls.
In the United States, to the contrary, voting is not obligatory, which gives rise to a phenomenon known in the election world as GOTV. Get Out The Vote. Every elected official knows about it.
U.S. campaigns dedicate huge amounts of resources, time and effort to get their supporters to the polls on election day. They know that typically 30-40% of registered voters stay home. I have directed 6-7 GOTV drives and can testify to the long, arduous, meticulous preparations necessary for launching a successful one.
I saw none of those preparations in the González camp. Zero. Their lack of experience and know-how is understandable given Ecuador´s system of obligatory voting.
Which brings me to the proverbial bottom line:
Luisa González can only hope to be elected not by the people but by surprise. We will know on in 2025 if the army of ghost voters spotted by Diego Orellana will create it.
Footnote: in public discussions like this one, to avoid indirectly giving instructions how to steal an election and not get caught, I employ a practice common among food contest winners. They are pleased to publish their recipes, but leave out a tiny but crucial ingredient.
Tom Warson is a former political consultant to senators, representatives, governors, mayors, city counselors and the media. He worked for electoral campaigns on all levels; for federal, state and local governments; and for all three branches. An accredited expert witness in Federal Court, he holds a Ph.D. in political science and M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida.
His most internationally-known clients:
Bill Richardson. Elected seven times to the House of Representatives and twice governor of New Mexico, Bill served as President Clinton´s Ambassador to the United Nations.