Ecuador: Daniel Noboa's electoral fraud

On Sunday 13 April, Ecuadorians went to the polls to elect their president in a second round of voting. The elections in Ecuador have been marred by irregularities, both in the first round and in the second, where the manoeuvring intensified.

Candidate and sitting President Daniel Noboa went to extreme lengths to use the state machinery to win these elections. But Luisa González, the opposition candidate representing the Citizen Revolution (CR) party, for her part, has not presented a socialist programme that could transform the lives of the working class and youth, which is why she has not been able to mobilise the masses behind her candidacy.

In her speech on the evening of election day, she denounced electoral fraud and did not recognise Daniel Noboa's victory. But she did not call on people to take to the streets to prevent Daniel Noboa's victory. She has limited herself to appealing to the electoral institutions, which are controlled by Noboa, and demanding a recount of the votes by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

The ‘official’ figures are as follows: Daniel Noboa obtained 55.6 percent of the votes against 44.4 percent for Luisa González. In the first round, Luisa González had obtained 4,510,000 votes. But, in the second round, she made very little progress, receiving only 4,680,000 votes, even with the support of Pachakutik, which obtained 538,000 votes in the first round (5.25 percent). This was one of the first signs of electoral fraud. In contrast, Daniel Noboa jumped from 4,527,000 votes in the first round to 5,860,000 votes in the second, a huge jump of 1,340,000 votes, which needs to be explained. It should be added that all previous opinion polls and even the exit polls indicated a tie, as in the first round, with a slight advantage for Luisa González.

The first irregularity is that Daniel Noboa did not resign from his position as president to run in the 2025 elections. During the election campaign, he continued to carry out his own presidential agenda and used the state apparatus to promote his candidacy, even in state broadcasts and activities, where he used his campaign’s colours.

Daniel Noboa used public resources and money for his election campaign, including paying out millions in bonuses to buy votes. Twenty-four hours before the polls opened, Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency in nine provinces, seven of which were behind Luisa González in the first round.

With the army and police on the streets, the people were intimidated by the state apparatus into voting for Noboa. Even by the standards of bourgeois democracy, the elections in Ecuador are not even close to ‘free and fair’. There are videos of soldiers manipulating ballot papers and inserting them into ballot boxes at the end of the election day.

The effect of the president's executive decree declaring a state of emergency in 9 provinces where Luisa Gonzalez had won the first round can be seen quite clearly. For example, in the province of Guayas, the most populous in Ecuador, where Luisa won the first round with 1,206,000 votes against Noboa's 1,083,000, Noboa won the second round with 1,326,000 votes against Luisa's 1,210,000. A state of emergency was also declared in the Metropolitan District of Quito, the capital of Ecuador. In the province of Pichincha, which contains Quito, Noboa won in the first round and extended his lead in the second, jumping from 906,000 to 1,178,000 votes, while Luisa advanced very little, from 700,000 to 718,000 votes.

Daniel Noboa used public resources and money for his election campaign, including paying out millions in bonuses to buy votes / Image: Presidencia de la República del Ecuador, Wikimedia Commons

Another significant irregularity is that, under the pretext of heavy rains that affected some provinces, the polling stations of thousands of voters were changed. A total of 24 polling stations for the second round were relocated in 10 different provinces.

Luisa González's team identified many modified tallies and discrepancies between the number of votes and the number of voters who turned out to vote. They found that, out of a total of 44,500 polling booth tallies, 1,984 had not been signed by both polling station officials, 1,526 did not match the number of voters, and 1,582 tallies showed results that deviated significantly from the average for the polling station. There was also a significant decrease in the number of blank votes, from 243,000 in the first round to 76,000 in the second round.

One more thing to note is that Noboa's election campaign and the bourgeois press have hysterically attacked Luisa González's proposal to create ‘peace managers’ – civilians who would be paid half the minimum wage to take charge of organising the communities most affected by surging, drug-related violence. They ran a smear campaign which compared this proposal to the experiences of Venezuela and Nicaragua in a distorted and exaggerated manner.

Two years of Daniel Noboa's government

Daniel Noboa's government has been a complete disaster. It has not stopped the advance of violence in Ecuador; poverty and extreme poverty indicators have risen, with 28 percent of Ecuador's population now living on less than 91 dollars a month; 52 percent of the working population are now in informal employment; there have been significant environmental disasters, with oil spills in rivers and forests; and there has been an unprecedented energy crisis, as, in September and December last year, Ecuadorians faced power cuts that lasted between 8 and 14 hours a day.

Noboa has governed since May 2023, after winning the early elections in April 2023. These elections were called after former president Guillermo Lasso decreed ‘mutual death’, which meant the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of new presidential and parliamentary elections. He had been completely demoralised by the 2022 National Strike, which saw hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians take to the streets to change their lives. Due to the lack of leadership with a revolutionary programme, the National Strike did not go any further. None of the demands raised in the streets were met by Guillermo Lasso, but after this he could no longer continue to govern.

During Daniel Noboa's two years in office, a series of authoritarian measures were implemented, the police and military were given free rein, and human rights were ignored in prisons. All this in the name of the war against drug traffickers. In reality, the state apparatus was and is being used to oppress Ecuadorians and their struggles for better living conditions.

This carte blanche given to the agents of state repression has culminated in the deaths of four children in Las Malvinas, a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Guayaquil. A group of sixteen military personnel tortured and killed Ismael, Josué, Nehemías and Steven – all aged between 11 and 15 – for no reason. The children disappeared on 8 December 2024 and were found burned near a military base in Taura on 24 December.

We cannot forget that in April 2024, Daniel Noboa ordered the invasion of the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest Jorge Glas, former-president Rafael Correa's vice-president, who had been accused of corruption. Such a scandalous episode is rarely seen, as it is a serious violation of the bourgeois international law. Mexico has broken off diplomatic relations with Ecuador since then.

An even more authoritarian government?

In the parliamentary elections in February, Noboa did not obtain a majority of seats in the National Assembly. Correa’s Citizen’s Revolution won 67 assembly members, the Indigenous people’s party Pachakutik 9 and Popular Unity one, which means that the opposition parties control 76 out of a total of 151 assembly seats, or half plus one, giving them narrow control of the legislature. Since then, however, it has been reported that a deputy from CR, Mónica Salazar, from the province of Los Ríos, declared herself independent on 15 April and will probably side with Daniel Noboa. It is not unlikely that others will do the same, both from the CR and Pachakutik.

In anticipation of a popular uprising against the blatant electoral fraud, Noboa's team circulated fake news that there were plans to assassinate the president / Image: Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador, Wikimedia Commons

During the election campaign, Daniel Noboa advocated a significant amendment to the Constitution regarding the presence of foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil. Under Rafael Correa's government, the presence of foreign military personnel in Ecuador was banned, which forced the US to close down its base in the country. Now, Daniel Noboa wants the US military to return and plans to start building a military base to station American soldiers in Manta as soon as possible to station. Noboa is sending very clear signals to Donald Trump that he wants to be a good servant of American imperialism.

In anticipation of a popular uprising against the blatant electoral fraud, Noboa's team circulated fake news that there were plans to assassinate the president, which served as a justification for filling the streets with police and soldiers in the days following the elections.

The 2019 insurrection and the 2022 National Strike were large-scale popular uprisings that expressed the discontent of the masses against their living and working conditions. They were revolutionary rehearsals that could have gone much further, even to the point of taking power, had there been a revolutionary leadership at the head of the demonstrations.

The Ecuadorian ruling class knows no other way out than austerity and attacks on labour and democratic rights. It seems to have found its representative in Daniel Noboa, which is why the bourgeois press is legitimising electoral fraud.

Noboa will use the state apparatus for repression with even greater intensity. He will not hesitate to violate democratic rights or declare a state of emergency, and now he has four more years to implement his programme of privatisation and attacks on rights, as well as to demonstrate his subservience to US imperialism.

Correísmo [supporters of former president Rafael Correa] and its party, Citizen Revolution, had enough popular support to win these elections, but its limited programme failed to mobilise the masses to counter this scandalous electoral fraud. Correísmo has once again demonstrated its limitations as an alternative for the working class by exclusively working within the limits of the framework of bourgeois democracy and law.

None of the problems of the working class and youth of Ecuador have been solved, nor can they be solved as long as capitalism exists. The coming period will be one of struggle for the working class, and it will be required to regroup and reorganise to face the oncoming attacks of Noboa. It is necessary to arm ourselves with a revolutionary programme of social transformation.