Ecuador's president claims 'irregularities' in first-round vote

Ecuador's Noboa alleges election irregularities, but observers find no fraud; runoff set for April 13.

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QUITO:

Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa claimed Tuesday there had been "irregularities" -- denied by observers -- in a first-round election in which he took a razor-thin lead, triggering a run-off.

The official outcome of Sunday's vote gave Noboa 44.15 percent of the votes cast, followed by 43.95 percent for leftist challenger Luisa Gonzalez -- an outcome closer than predicted by opinion polls.

"There were many irregularities," Noboa, 37, told a domestic radio station Tuesday, insisting his campaign team's own tally gave him a "higher figure" and that work to check the official count was continuing.

European Union election observers on the ground, however, said they had seen no evidence of fraud, and the Organization of American States (OAS) said its own initial count was in line with that of Ecuador's electoral council.

With 50 percent of votes required for a first-round victory, a runoff is set for April 13.

Noboa, the heir to a billion-dollar banana export business, campaigned on his crackdown on drug cartel violence blamed for a surge in murder, kidnapping and extortion in Ecuador in recent years.

In 2023, the once-peaceful country recorded a record 47 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, and after Noboa's first 14 months in office, the figure dropped to 38 per 100,000, according to official data.

Gonzalez, a 47-year-old lawyer, has called for greater respect for human rights in the war on the cartels, and said Sunday's result showed "that people want change."

The next president will also contend with massive state debt, worsened by the costly war on gangs, and a poverty rate of 28 percent.

Noboa was elected in 2023 to complete the four-year term of predecessor Guillermo Lasso, who had called a snap vote to avoid impeachment for alleged embezzlement.

One of the world's youngest leaders, Noboa insisted Tuesday there were "dozens and dozens of cases in which people were threatened in order to vote for the Citizen Revolution" party of rival Gonzalez.

But Gabriel Mato, head of an EU observer mission in Ecuador, told reporters in Quito: "We do not have a single objective element to indicate that there had been any type of fraud."