By: Mark Weisbrot
By: Mark Weisbrot
When Donald Trump began his latest campaign to convince the American people and the world, or at least his supporters, that his election victory was stolen, he received no support from the majority of the American media. Here, most journalists, as well as experts they trust, wanted to see evidence. And they found none.
But the same standards do not always apply when the phrase “stop the robbery” becomes the rallying cry of electoral losers in other countries. As you read this, a concerted effort is underway to discredit the February 7 presidential election in Ecuador. The last chapter, started during the weekend, has the Attorney General and the Comptroller General of the current Government dealing with to seize all “the digital content of the database administered by the electoral computer system.” The National Electoral Council (CNE) has rejected the request.
Since the CNE is by law an independent body, this attempt totally violates the laws and the Constitution of Ecuador. But it is worse than that. As with Trump’s electoral defeat, there is no question here about the outcome of the elections. In this case, however, there is a government, aligned with some commercial interests and with one of the losing candidates, that is trying to strip the population of their basic democratic rights.
That the government of President Lenín Moreno resorted to such measures does not surprise anyone familiar with its mandate. Two months ago, a letter Signed by 13 members of the United States Congress summarized Moreno’s undemocratic way of governing, which far surpassed that of his most important ally, Donald Trump:
“In recent years, President Moreno and his allies have imprisoned and persecuted opponents, violently repressed demonstrations and carried out dubious maneuvers to try to prevent opposition leaders from participating in the country’s February elections of 2021 ”.
But Moreno was unable to keep the largest opposition movement in the country out of the electoral contest, despite a series of illegal measures aimed at doing exactly that. Andrés Arauz, economist who served as minister and director of the Central Bank in the previous social democratic government of Rafael Correa (2007 – 2017), won the first round on February 7.
Arauz came in first place with 32, 72% of votes , a margin of 13 points over Guillermo Lasso (19, 72%), and with Yaku Pérez having obtained the 19, 39%. This was so despite the deep media bias against Arauz, coupled with last minute illegalities imposed by the electoral authorities, such as the prohibition of both the images and the voice of former President Correa in Arauz’s campaign advertising.
Lasso is a banker running for president for the third time; Pérez, lawyer, politician and indigenous activist. Pérez denounced fraud and demanded a recount. It has not presented evidence of fraud. But his assertions were favored by the geographical optics of vote counting: for most of the week following the elections, Pérez maintained an advantage over Lasso, insisting that he had won.
Nonetheless, anyone looking at the data could see that the areas remaining to be accounted for clearly harbored greater and greater support for Lasso, and that Pérez’s advantage would disappear. It seems that Pérez himself must also have known; perhaps he is the first candidate in an election to demand a recount while still at the top of the counted votes.
In fact, a statistical projection performed at 5: 43 am of the next day to the elections it already showed that Pérez’s chances of being in second place were extremely close to zero; and that its projected average loss margin would be 0. 37% (ended up being 0. 35%).
It must be admitted that, in this case, the conspiracy theory of the electoral losers (Pérez and his new allies in the Moreno government ) is not so clear on who did what to whom, or how, or for what reason, to supposedly remove Pérez from second place. And logistically it is almost impossible to even come up with a plausible theory of how it could have happened.
The same logistical impossibility and lack of evidence characterized the allegations of fraud in the October elections of 2019 in Bolivia. In the Bolivian case, there was a prolonged repetition of false complaints in the media, with a support to the conspiracy theory by the Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States, in set with the Trump Administration. The false claims in Bolivia led to a military coup shortly after; and then to massacres of indigenous Bolivians by the coup government that had taken power. Today, most journalists familiar with the Bolivian elections know that the accusations of electoral fraud on which the coup was based were false.
In contrast to its reports on Bolivia, the OAS observation mission in Ecuador has rejected the current false accusations of fraud, stating : “from the results it appears that , in the second round of 11 April candidates Andrés Arauz and Guillermo Lasso will compete for the presidency of the republic ”. He also denounced the interference of the Attorney General and the Comptroller General in the electoral process.
The right to free and democratic elections is a fundamental human right, and should not be violated so easily when there are unfounded allegations of fraud. The same standards that the majority of the media, government officials and experts applied to Trump should apply in all elections: show us the evidence.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Research in Economics and Politics ( CEPR ) based in Washington, DC He is also the author of “ Failure: what the ‘experts’ did not understand about the global economy l ”(2007, Oxford University Press).
Translation by Francesca Emanuele
