Establishment socialist candidate Luisa González and 35-year-old business heir Daniel Noboa will go to a second runoff election set for October following the general presidential election in Ecuador on Sunday – a vote tainted by widespread political violence and cybercrime.
Noboa and González faced off against six other candidates – one of whom, anti-socialist corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio, died in a messythat left 20 others injured on August 9. Villavicencio began his career as a journalist exposing the corruption of radical leftist ex-President Rafael Correa, González patron and currently a fugitive of justice manipulating Ecuadorian politics from a perch in Belgium.
Given the high positions that Noboa, Zurita, and Topic achieved, González appears to have benefitted from a fracturing of the anti-socialist vote; her left-wing contenders received marginal support. In a runoff election, Noboa will have to court voters who chose other alternatives, likely out of distaste for Correa’s socialist coalition, giving him a potential edge, if he can exploit it.
The president of the CNE, Diana Atamaint, announced following the election that the agency’s online platform for absentee voting was the target of a wave of cyberattacks from abroad. Among the countries she named as origin nations of the attacks were China, Russia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. “The platform for absentee voting suffered cyberattacks that affected the fluidity to enter the voting page,” AtamaintWhile the CNE claimed that no votes were affected by the attacks – which, according to Ecuadorians abroad speaking to Infobae, made it impossible to access the page to choose a candidate – some reports indicate that absentee voter turnout was noticeably low during a particularly contentious presidential election.