Quito, Oct 15 (EFE).- Voting in the second round of Ecuador’s presidential elections concluded on Sunday afternoon with the closing of the polling stations so that the correista Luisa Gonzalez and businessman Daniel Noboa await the first official results of the scrutiny.
The voting centers closed at 17:00 local time (22:00 GMT) after a ten-hour election day that passed usually and without serious incidents, with a participation of 82.33%, according to both the National Electoral Council (CNE) and the electoral observation mission of the Organization of American States (OAS).
The counting of votes began from the moment the electoral precincts closed, and the first official results are expected around 18:30 and 19:00 local time (between 23:30 and 00:00 GMT), according to the CNE.
After voting in Canuto, the rural town in the coastal province of Manabi where he grew up, Gonzalez arrived in the capital, Quito, to wait for the results.
Meanwhile, Noboa voted in Olon, a seaside resort in the coastal province of Santa Elena, where he has a property where he will also await the progress of the scrutiny.
More than 13.4 million Ecuadorians were summoned to the polls for this election to choose the successor of the current president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, and complete the 2021-2025 period, which the current ruler will not finish after having applied the mechanism of the “crossed death.”
With this action, he opted to leave office early and force this extraordinary electoral process by dissolving the National Assembly (Parliament), controlled by an opposition led by Correism, when he was about to vote on an impeachment motion as a final step in an impeachment trial in which he was accused of alleged embezzlement (embezzlement), a charge he rejects.
Thus, the winner of the elections will have a short term of approximately 15 months, as he is expected to take office in December until May 2025, when Ecuador will return to its regular election schedule.
On the one hand, the candidate of Revolución Ciudadana (RC), the movement led by former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), seeks the return of Correaism to the national government of Ecuador, after seven years since the end of the presidential decade of the former president.
In front, the candidate of the National Democratic Action (ADN) alliance, heir of one of the wealthiest families in Ecuador, seeks a program focused on youth to reach the presidency that resisted up to five times his father, the banana magnate Álvaro Noboa.
In case González wins, the 45-year-old lawyer with peasant origins from the Ecuadorian coast will become the first woman to win a presidential election. In contrast, if Noboa does, he will become, at 35 years old, the youngest president in the history of Ecuador. EFE
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