Electoral schools in Ecuador close with 83.7% participation
Now it only remains to wait. Ecuador’s electoral colleges closed at five in the afternoon of this Sunday after a second round that passed without major incidents. Now it remains to wait for at least three hours, which is the deadline that the National Electoral Council (CNE) estimates will take a count of irreversible results. The participation in these elections was 83.76% of all voters forced to vote, according to the latest CNE report, a few tenths above the first round.
The hours before the end of the day was a hotbed of surveys that give a triumph adjusted to one or the other of the candidates: Daniel Noboa, the current conservative president, and Luis González, of Correism.
The president, who goes for the re -election after a year and a half of government – said the failed mandate of Guillermo Lasso – will wait for the results in Oón, a coastal village of less than 5,000 inhabitants northwest of Guayaquil, where he has a luxurious residence. He does not want to repeat the fiasco of the first round of February, when he stayed in Quito to celebrate a razed victory and had to settle for a difference of only 17,000 votes over the leftist candidate. Luisa González, on the other hand, is already in the Ecuadorian capital.
The election day passed “normally”, according to the summary that international observers made during the afternoon. Heraldo Muñoz, head of the OAS mission, recalled earlier that voters should not get carried away by anxiety and distrust post electoral surveys. “You have to wait patiently until the last vote and not trust the Exit Polls, which are nothing more than statistical estimates,” he said. Two pollsters authorized by the CNE performed polls, but the result is expected so adjusted that they will have little capacity to anticipate.
It has been, with everything, an atypical day. Ecuador has lived since January 2024, by decision of Noboa, in a situation of “internal armed conflict.” This implies the police and military control of towns and cities and, since this Saturday, curfew between ten o’clock at night and five in the morning in seven provinces. González denounced at the time of voting that the state of exception decreed by the president on the eve affects his electorate. “They decree a state of exception when political parties will be in the computer centers receiving minutes. It is a way of force not to mobilize,” Gonzalez complained after voting in Canuto, a small town in the coastal province of Manabí.
