The plot of electoral fraud in Ecuador | A fu …

From Quito. An attempted fraud is said to be underway for next Sunday’s elections in Ecuador. Key players, delivery channels and funding are already in an advanced process. It is told by a source from the leadership of the National Electoral Council (CNE) during a meeting in the south of Quito. His goal in speaking, he explains, is to make the presidential vote transparent and avoid a maneuver prepared by the two key men, allies for the elections: Guillermo Lasso, presidential candidate of the CREO party, and Jaime Nebot, leader of the Christian Social Party.

Players

The architecture of the attempted fraud has four main levels at the CNE, the source specifies: the dome, the links, the middle zones and the provincial delegations.

The first, that is to say the leadership, would be under the command of two strongmen of the Ecuadorian right, who appointed three of the five advisers. Lasso placed Enrique Pita as vice-president, Nebot has Jose cabrera. As for the president, Diana Atamaint, “She came through social organizations, and when she took over as a counselor, there was an agreement that was made in Nebot’s house on the island of Mocolí to be president. of the CNE and she has replied since then “, explains the source, who, for security reasons, asks to keep your identity in reserve.

Second, there are the connections between the advisers, Lasso and Nebot. They are two key men, outside the CNE structure: Caesar Monge, president of CREO, and Pascual del cioppo, member of the management of the CFP. “They’re the ones that the advisers get together with, or the advisers down there, and they give direction to them,” he says, with a flowchart that indicates each room and its role.

Third, each of the advisers has advisers who play a central role in the maneuver. This is the case of Andrea Cardenas and Christian Solis, who work for Pita, Francisco Yépez and Valeria grande, at the command of Atamaint, Gabriela Zurita and Fidel Ycaza, which are under the command of Cabrera. One of their tasks is “to carry out different actions in the provinces such as changing directors, technical staff, suggesting names to be civil servants, placing Lasso people in the main fraud sites”.

In the middle zone, a lower rank, is the technical commission of electoral processes and information technologies, which plays a decisive role. There are key people like Lucy pomboza -who is also the national director of electoral processes-, Stalin Cardona and Esteban Montero. “All the national and provincial directors are subject to inform and to proceed according to the directives given by the commission”, he explains, alerted by the imminence of the installation of a structured and invisible fraud which will give the victory at Lasso.

Tracks

This set of political actors, management, liaison and intermediate zones would carry out the already advanced preparation of the fraud plan which should be developed through two channels: the voting tables and the digitization centers. The first case on the day of the vote and the second at the time of the count.

Fraud in polling stations can be carried out on the basis of a central fact: the holding at the CNE of around 600,000 undeclared ballots, obtained before the first ballot. The maneuver came about when an error occurred in printing more than six million ballots, which forced a new purchase of security paper – regulated and acquired in Canada – a move in which there was a surplus which was not verified. This means that “they can inject original ballots with security paper in different provinces in favor of the Lasso,” he explains.

The mechanism would be as follows: Those responsible for the design of the fraud select the tables to which to send the 600,000 surplus ballots, tables which must have certain characteristics. One is the location: “it is mostly in rural areas due to lack of proper control, and larger theaters in urban areas, where political organizations hardly ever have the operation to fill it. completely with a veedor at each of the tables. “. The other characteristic is that in Each of the selected tables must have a coordinator who is part of the fraud.

The goal, according to those familiar with the inner workings of the CNE, is to “overload” the tables with excess and undeclared votes in favor of the Lasso. This addition of votes would result in the existence of a greater number of votes in relation to the number of voters. Faced with this scenario, the coordinators will be able to choose between two possibilities: recognize the total number of ballots instead of the number of voters, or cancel the excess of votes compared to that of the voters. In that case the coordinators, prepared within the framework of the operation, would withdraw this total of votes from Andrés Arauz, leaving the correismo candidate with fewer votes than those obtained and Lasso with an aggregate through the ballots added as part of the fraud.

The second programmed path of outcome alteration would be designed to occur a count of the votes in the minutes. “The order within the CNE is, first of all, that Lasso wins. Second, if the percentage of vote is a technical tie in favor of Lasso, the CNE will publish immediate results, and if the technical tie is in favor of Arauz, they will not publish and it will be set in recount, and there they will go to change the results, ”says the source.

The fraud mechanism would, in this case, be the center of action “In the provincial delegations with people and leaders of Lasso and Nebot positions during the last weeks “of the management and intermediate areas of the CNE. The so-called examination reports will arrive there, which must be scanned to be taken into account by the computer system, as long as there is no no irregularities. They can be of three types: numerical inconsistencies, that is to say that the scanner does not recognize the data in the file and they are unreadable files, problems in the signatures, or an inconsistency between the count statement that the political party will have and the one that the CNE will have.

“We have discovered a system which consists in putting the sheet incorrectly so that the scanner does not recognize the visual points, the minutes pass to the recount, and manually, the votes are inflated”, explains the source. Manual change can occur in several ways: altering the same certificate, which will not have security paper, or replacing it with another pre-printed certificate, which will then be scanned and calculated. An act has an average of 280 votes – out of a maximum of 350 – which means that changing a thousand minutes would be equivalent to falsifying around 280,000 votes. This equipment, in turn, has players in the IT part, such as Laura Molina, responsible for “attaching illegible minutes reports”.

“They can change from 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 votes” thanks to the combination of different fraud mechanisms, explains the source. The electoral list in Ecuador is 13,099,150 voters, of which 10,616,263 took part in the first presidential and legislative round on February 7.

Anyone who denounces the device claims that the pieces are now ready to act and that executing the plan would mean fraud to prevent Arauz from winning. The threats of the electoral power against the candidacy of the citizens’ revolution are not new. They occurred from zero hour as part of a political and institutional strategy to prevent the participation, victory and return of correismo to the presidential palace of Carondelet. This electoral fraud plan would represent the last card in an attempt to prevent the victory of the one who heads the majority of the polls.