The National Electoral Council will rule on the decision of the Foreign Electoral Board, which annulled the results of the elections abroad due to failures in the telematic voting system.
Users of telematic voting abroad denounced the impossibility of exercising their right to vote, on August 20, 2023.
The Special Foreign Board, in charge of counting the votes of Ecuadorians abroad, declared the nullity of the vote on August 20 in the three constituencies abroad, due to problems with the telematic voting system, which prevented many from voting migrants.
According to the National Electoral Council, there were more than 100,000 registered for telematic voting. But the organization’s results page reports that only 51,623 migrants were able to vote on August 20, 2023.
This figure contrasts with the 119,804 Ecuadorians abroad who voted in person in the first electoral round of 2021.
According to a report on the operation of the telematic voting system, prepared by the CNE, the company Antroproyectos SC did not respond to the requirements of the users or the CNE itself on time, during the failures in the foreign voting.
Preproyectos SC was contracted by the CNE for the support, accompaniment and management service for telematic voting. However, before the complaints from the different consulates in America and Europe, the contractor only verbally informed that the system was suffering from a cyber attack. She but she did not give details about it.
This information “was not sent officially and with documentary support” and when this information was not received ” no immediate action could be taken “, the contract administrators at the CNE affirm.
It was two days after the vote, on August 22, that the company finally reported that the telematic voting system “was the target of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack.” And they reported 2.82 million invalid requests between 04:27 and 12:00, which were the ones that saturated the system and prevented registered users from voting.
In the conclusions, the CNE report explains that the contractor did not take into account the effective measures necessary to ensure the continuity of the process, that it has not shown where the attacks came from, and that the reason for the inconsistencies in the records “is not yet clear. ” .
For all this, the National Legal Directorate of the CNE recommended to the plenary session that the declaration of nullity of the elections abroad be accepted.
The Council plans to discuss the resolution of the Special Foreign Board in the plenary session on August 25, at 7:00 p.m. It will depend on the decision of the plenary if the elections are repeated or not, only in the three constituencies abroad and in what way they would be executed.
The reactions
This decision was celebrated by the Citizen Revolution, which would win three of the six legislators for the United States and Canadian constituencies; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Europe, Asia and Oceania.
The other three assembly members who would obtain a seat represent the Construye movement, for which reason the former minister and elected assembly member, Patricio Carrillo, denounced that it is a strategy to change the results, since correísmo did not obtain the majority of seats abroad.
The leadership of the Citizen Revolution demands that the elections be repeated abroad, in person, that is, with physical ballots.
While the Construye movement argues that repeating these elections in the second round would be unconstitutional and that it would violate the rights of the already elected assembly members.
