Ecuador,Confessions of an election observer

[Judi Lynn]

Ecuador,Confessions of an election observer
Sunday, March 3, 2013

Ecuador news - Most people – which included me until last week – imagine that being an election observer means being jetted into a country, bussed round a few polling stations, and, having made sure that no one was refused a vote at the point of a gun, flown out again.

~snip~

I arrived in Quito a fortnight ago, and two shocks awaited. The first was the weather, cool and drizzly; the second was the serious study that awaited. On my first day, we (300 observers from 40 countries) were given seminars on Ecuador's electoral system and loaded down with tomes on electoral law. During a break, I had the good fortune to meet the head of Ecuador's electoral institute (El Instituto de la Democracia del Consejo Nacional Electoral de Ecuador), Richard Ortiz Ortiz, who spent an hour and half explaining to me the intricacies of different systems of proportional representation.

Ortiz had spent 12 years in Germany studying European electoral systems and was thrilled to have become the person responsible for drafting Ecuador's electoral rules. "I was like a botanist who has read books for years, coming to the Amazon to study the ants," he said. As he drew diagrams showing how to allocate seats in the – to me – hitherto unknown Webster and d'Hondt systems, I began to feel dizzy and the numbers swirled before my eyes. But then we were 2,800 metres above sea level. Later, we were given booklets with exercises in allocating parliamentary seats.

Ecuador's new electoral authority wants to show that it can organise a clean election in a country once scarred by corruption. As well as inviting independent missions from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Union of South American States (Unasur), it had also welcomed dozens of "personalities" – academics, journalists, politicians – such as a former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet, and the Argentine Nobel peace prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel. There were also electoral officials from around the world and representatives of the Arab League, the African Union and the Asean bloc of south-east Asian countries. The British delegation consisted of me (a journalist and author of books about Latin America) and Jenny Rathbone (a Labour MP in the Welsh Assembly).

More:
http://ecuadornews.blogspot.com/2013/03/ecuadorconfessions-of-election-observer.html

or:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/confessions-of-an-election-observer-8517957.html
(By subscription)

[iemitsu]

1. Hum, clean elections after a history of corruption.

Then, maybe there's hope for us.
Except we are the reason that corruption prevailed for so long in Latin America. Maybe if our government (and the CIA) ignored our own elections for 10 years, the electorate could usher in some new and uncorrupted blood?

[Warpy]

2. The more I learn about Ecuador, the more favorably impressed I've been

Most of the peasants are still left out of the economy, but the government seems to be moving left to try to accommodate them.

It's one of the places I'd like to visit. I'm already used to the altitude.

[dtom67]

3. I have some hope left...

I'll give it to Equador.

Won't need it here...

[Peace Patriot]

4. Ecuador has a rival on clean elections--Venezuela, which Jimmy Carter recently said has...

..."THE best election system in the world."

Thanks for this info, Judi Lynn! And for the link! I'm very interested in the details of election systems. Our own is so rigged it's pitiful. And my own researches into Venezuela's system, some years ago, was pivotal in my assessment of the Chavez administration, and also, in my assessment of the corporate press and their mindboggling, ten year anti-Chavez campaign.

Among their many journalistic crimes against Chavez and the Venezuelan people, they never once mention that Chavez can prove that he was elected, whereas there is not a single office-holder in the USA who can prove that he or she was actually elected. Chavez has been honestly elected. Our leaders not so much. Bush-Cheney were never elected, either time. I think Obama was really elected but by a bigger margin than we know (his margin shaved as one of the shackles on any real reform). Half the current House of Reps was not elected (rather, (s)elected by ES&S/Diebold); many senators not elected (starting with Chuck Hagel and his first US Senate race and his re-election; now Sec of Defense, Hagel was a founder of ES&S and the first beneficiary of its vote rigging capability); and many governorships and state legislatures have been rigged.

We are forced to guess who was and was not elected here (not difficult, really), because the vote counting has been privatized and is largely controlled by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--using 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that the public is forbidden to review--with NO AUDIT AT ALL in half the states in the US, and a miserably inadequate audit in the other half. Back when the exit polls were honest, we could do more than guess (for instance, Kerry clearly won the '04 election). But now the exit polls are rigged as well (made to conform to ES&S/Diebold results). We're actually worse off now, as to the riggability of our system, than we were in '00 or '04. (The Supreme Court intervened in '00 and appointed Bush because the system WASN'T yet this rigged--they had to stop the FLA recount because it would have shown that Gore won*; the electronic rigging was installed, very swiftly, during the 2002 to 2004 period, and was sufficiently in place by '04 to keep Mr. Stupid in the White House, and to continue all the war, torture and looting; the riggable system is now in place in all states, and with no honest exit polls as a check on results--so the Cabal that is running things can do whatever they want--they have nooses round the necks of all office holders.)

And one of the main reasons that Latin Americans have been able to elect FDR-type leaders, who are implementing vast reforms along New Deal lines, is the great work that has been done by ordinary citizens and by election monitoring groups, such as the Carter Center and the OAS, to create and monitor honest election systems in Latin America.

Venezuela and Ecuador have different vote counting systems. Venezuela votes electronically, but the code that tots up the votes is OPEN SOURCE CODE (belongs to the public; anyone can review) and they do a whopping 55% audit (comparison of electronic totals to ballots)--more than five times the necessary audit to detect fraud in an electronic system. (Our system is run on 'TRADE SECRET' code, with, as I said, NO AUDIT in half the states and only a 1% audit in the other half. Our system is made to order for fraud.)

Ecuador's system is the one we should return to, to cleanse our elections of all corporate involvement. Here it is (from the OP):

At 5pm, the count began in each polling station. At each voting table, volunteers began to open the cardboard urns, watched by observers from the political parties sitting exactly three metres away. The volunteers than began to "sing the votes" – showing each ballot paper to the party hacks and calling out the name of the candidate marked. It was hard to see how a single vote could go astray under the hawk-eyed gaze of the party observers who barracked and cross-questioned each table of volunteers. As the tables round the room began to sing out the names: "Correa", "Correa", "Correa", "Lasso", "Correa", the President's convincing victory became clear. --from the OP

PAPER BALLOTS COUNTED IN PUBLIC!

------------------------------

*(Interestingly, the Corporate Press did a joint study of FLA '00 and established that Gore won--but didn't publish their study until Sept. 12, 2001. It didn't get much play.)

[iemitsu]

5. Your analysis of our election system and both those of Venezuela and Ecuador

seems spot on to me.
I have a rather right-wingish brother who is married to an Ecuadorian woman. They live in a town outside of Quito.
While I would hesitate to say that Ecuador reformed his Reagan like attitudes, he is impressed at how much the lives of regular citizens are improving.
It is also good to see some positive mention here about Chavez, who is always attacked whenever his name is mentioned.
Thank you and the OP for bringing this news to our attention.