The unusual seven ways of capturing the popular vote

Everything is worth when trying to win votes that, after the February 19 elections, allows political parties to have access one of the 137 seats in the National Assembly (15 national, 116 provincial and six foreign Assembly members).

Candidates for Assembly members manage to attract the public´s attention. They participate in rallies, walks and caravans with the presidential candidates, but also they work alone, with the county and neighborhood leaders in search of the popular vote.

Next, the most innovative forms with which the hopefuls to the legislature try to catch the voters.

1. These are not directly delivered by the candidates of the Adelante Ecuatoriano Adelante party, but the neighborhood leaders who accompany them through the areas of greatest poverty in the four districts of the Guayas province. The party led by the banana magnate Alvaro Noboa Pontón is identified with this.

2. That and other agricultural products is what Luis Vinces, the candidate of the Ecuadorian Union Movement for the district two of the province of Guayas gives away. According to him, a peasant never arrives empty-handed to his house and, therefore, he always finishes his door-to-door visits with the satisfaction that some low-income family will have dinner that day, at least fried green bananas.

3. This is always distributed during the itineraries of candidate Marcos Matamoros, of the the Concertación Movement. It is not bottled water, but he tours the peripheral zone of district three of the Guayas province, delivering water through a tanker.

4. They also call it “peloteo” and is practiced in the neighborhoods by candidates Luis el ‘Chino’ Gómez,” of Alianza PAIS, and Edder Calderón, of the Adelante Ecuatoriano Adelante party, as a way to attract supporters.

5. In addition to fun, candidates arrive with solutions to small needs, as Wendy Vera, the candidate of the PAIS party did, who flattened a pitch located at the Bastion Popular area with a tractor. They also paint houses, or participate in community clean-ups in La Colmena cooperative, in Pascuales, as other candidates of the same party did.

6. In the style of the candy street vendors, Fanny Aguilar (Ecuadorean Union) and Gustavo Espinoza (Centro Democrático) get on the urban buses to present their campaign proposals. But they also tour the neighborhoods on their bikes.

7. These are the means used to promote their work plan in the Guayas District 4 and, generally, in the rural area. A tractor is employed by the vice-presidential hopeful Alex Alcívar (binomial of Washington Pesántez) in his country tours. The cavalcades are also part of the promotion of the candidates of the Centro Democrático and Alianza PAIS.