-- Quentin Crisp --
NOTE: Please read first our prior post, "Election Fraud 101. Watch Out, Ecuador."
The Ecuadorian election is over.
Sadly, their adventure in democracy two days ago contains a misadventure. In fact, over 800,000 misadventures ...
The adventure:
As we wrote and public opinion polls predicted, President Rafael Correa won re-election in a runaway, 56.7% to 23.3% for second place finisher, Guillermo Lasso, conservative banker and C.I.A. candidate of choice. Six other candidates split the difference. There will be no April runoff election.
As for the misadventures:
According to the CNE, the government body in charge of elections, somebody tried to hack the system. CNE President Domingo Paredes made the announcement noon February 17 while the election was still taking place. We may never know who the would-be infiltrator was. But one thing is certain: it wasn´t your Aunt Mary.
Our prior post showed one way a computerized election could be stolen, and expressed the hope that the CNE would take nothing for granted. It turns out the CNE was prepared and protected itself well.
The CNE also announced on Election Day that over 800,000 attempts were made to infiltrate and instruct its web site page. The page is separate from the election process so even if the attempts had succeeded the vote count would not have been altered. Or would it? The CNE web site contains valuable information. Among other things, an Ecuadorian can enter his identity card number and see where he needs to go to vote, map included. Bottom line: if you wanted to disrupt the Ecuadorian election, I can think of no better place to start than the CNE web site.
What on earth (or elsewhere) was going on?
Last year, a mammoth voter fraud occurred in Ecuador. 73,000 signatures of registered voters were falsified and then assigned to political parties on their petitions for official registration. (Signatures of 1.5% of all registered voters are necessary for an organization to qualify as a party). Oddly, the false signatures were assigned across the board to all organizations, hence none of them gained.
At great cost and even greater embarrassment, the system was subsequently cleaned up, and a handful of CNE employees who sold the national computerized voter list were arrested. But this question remains: since nobody gained, what was the motive of the fraud?
I think somebody wanted to test the CNE system, and at the same time discredit it. 73,000 signatures? Come on ... Anybody who has collected signatures for political campaigns (I have) is not fooled for a single second. That fraud wasn´t perpetrated by a Groover McTuber kid camped out at The Gaslight Motel. To mount a fraud of that magnitude costs megabucks.
Try $87 million. A former British ambassador alleges that is how much the C.I.A. amassed to defeat President Correa on Sunday.
The 73,000 false signatures and the 800,000 attempts to break and enter the CNE web site are consistent with the overall strategy of discrediting Ecuador´s electoral system.
In the end, the attempts to dirty up the Joneses failed.
C.I.A., you are out of step and out of touch.