I have not followed the Ecuador vote closely, but I had the impression, from reports of opinion polls, that it was going to be close. But, PoliBlog notes a report that Rafael Correa appears to have won around 65% in Sunday’s two-candidate runoff for the presidency. 65-35 is not close. This is a surprise. (Update: Greg Weeks reports 57%; that still is not close.)
Why were polls off by so much? I don’t know enough about Ecuadorian politics or polling to know, but if Correa really won around 65% it would be quite a polling failure. Such a result would also be surprising inasmuch as the first round was so fragmented. Correa won only 22.8%, which placed him four percentage points behind the first-round leader, Alvaro Noboa. The third and fourth candidates had 17.5 and 14.8 percent, respectively. That both of these candidates were from nominally leftist parties is presumably key to Correa’s having apparently picked up so much of their support. Even so, the polls did not track that.
Despite the “mandate” of the presidential runoff, governing will not be easy. It never is in Ecuador, where the “fixed term” of the presidency is not to be taken for granted. The unicameral congress that was elected–using open-list PR* in mostly low-magnitude districts–at the same time as the first round of the presidential election will have no single party with even 30% of the vote (and the largest is Noboa’s party). I do not even see Correa’s own alliance (it is not a party) in the alphabet soup of results. The second largest party in congress, with just under a quarter of the seats, will be the Popular Socialist Party, which significantly out-polled its own persidential candidate (who came in third). Rarely have I seen so little correspondence between first-round presidential and PR-congressional voting. I guess that’s why various scholars use Ecuador as a prime example of the “inchoate” or “uninstitutiuonalized” party system.
* The link on the congressional result is to Adam Carr’s site, which gives the preference votes for the elected candidates in each district.
At least I thought this was now an open-list system. But in looking more closely at the votes totals, some of the elected candidates are shown with a “personal vote” that is greater than that of their party. So, now I am confused as to what this electoral system is.
Registered voters: 9,020,773
Votes cast: 5,243,703 58.1
Invalid votes: 2,183,362 41.6
Valid votes: 3,060,341 58.4
Look at the high rate of invalid votes. So are invalid votes not added to or influencing how many seats each party got. Ecuador uses a small multi member districts with Guayas 18 seats and Pichincha 14 seats being the exceptions. It looks Ecuador is using a cross between a mixed member system and open list PR. With so many votes being invalid and at such a high percentage, perhaps the country should change or modify it’s electoral system. It could be voter education that is causing all the invalid votes.
The countries parliament doesn’t look nearly as fragmented as the Dutch parliamentary election has produced. Perhaps in developing countries PR producing less fragmentation than it does in developed nations. only 5 parties would have gained representation if there had been a 5% nation wide threshold.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 27 November 2006 @ 16:00
That is a very high number of invalid votes.
As for the fragmentation, of course, much of it is about regionalism.
Seed planted by MSS — 27 November 2006 @ 20:56
That is a lot of invalids and a low turnout! According to Adam, 71 percent voted in the first-round presidential election (with 17% invalid), and only 58 percent for congress (with 41% invalid). I was tempted to say it’s just a lot of blank/spoiled ballots due to compulsory voting, but that’s a BIG difference, where it really looks like something’s going on with the process.
Probably the closest comparison is Peru, where voting is also compulsory–in April, turnout was 89 percent for BOTH president (16% invalid) and congress (27% invalid).
It does vary by area, from 30-50 percent. The lowest number of Congress blank/null votes seems to have been in the immediate Guayaquil area (Guayas) and in the Amazon basin, with the highest around Quito and in the Andes.
Can’t conjecture any more about the electoral system since only the 2nd round results now seem to be online…
Seed planted by Alex — 27 November 2006 @ 23:11
I think Blais&Massicotte name Ecuador´s electoral system as “super-mixed”, but can´t remember the specific details.
And Correa wasn´t running candidates for Congress. Talking about inchoate party systems…
Seed planted by El Criador de Gorilas — 29 November 2006 @ 06:40
The electoral system of Ecuador is discussed at the ACE project, but that doesn’t answer all the questions raised here.
Seed planted by Bancki — 30 November 2006 @ 04:09
The reason that you don’t see Correa’s party in the alphabet soup is that he chose not to let anyone run. One of his primary campaign promises was to call for a constitutional convention to overhaul the congress. He cites statistics showing that 90% or more of the people think that the congress is corrupt. I have not read through the constitution, but I would think that this would be a major uphill battle without the consent of congress (and implicitly its principals). The best result I see is gridlock between the gates, at worst . . .
Seed planted by Dschneider — 01 December 2006 @ 11:18
Correa envisioned a showdown with congress of the sort Chavez orchestrated and won in 1998. Chavez, rather than getting the consent of congress via the formal and constitutional process of reforming the constitution, used the politics of protest and the street to elect a seperate constitutional assembly to rewrite the document. The move was challenged in the courts, but the courts came down on his side citing the overwhelming public sentiment in his favor. This is the sort of maneuver Correa seems to have in mind. He campaigned suggested he didn’t have any plan to do battle with congress on reforming the constitution. His campaign promise, by not contesting any congressional seats, was essentially to have a showdown over legitimacy and bypass the congress altogether by electing a seperate constitutional assembly.
Seed planted by Tom — 01 December 2006 @ 13:17
OK… here is how the Ecuadorian electoral system works. As far as I can tell.
Voters can choose to vote EITHER for a list (votación en plancha) or for individual candidates (votación nominal). They can vote for as many candidates as they want, up to the number that are elected from the district.
The lists (planchas) are then assigned seats based on the “votación consolidada”. This consists of (1) the number of votes for lists PLUS (2) the total number of votes for individuals on the list, multiplied by a “factor ponderador” (‘weighting factor’). The “factor ponderador” is the inverse of the average number of votes that each person voting for individuals cast. So if each person who chose to vote for individuals voted for 9 candidates, the “factor ponderador” is 1/9. Is this still ridiculously simple?
OK. So now that we have the “consolidated vote” we apply d’Hondt (no changes here) and distribute seats. The votación nominal determines seats within lists, as far as I can tell.
Example:
In Pichincha (14 seats) there were 542,770 votes for lists and 202,055 people who voted for individuals. Those 202,055 people cast 1,206,044 votes or an average of 5.97 votes per person (well below what they are entitled to). The weighting factor is therefore 1/5.97 or .1675.
We will consider the leading plancha, ID/RED, which received 133,309 list votes and 324,639 total nominal votes. 324,639*.1675 = 54,389. 133,309+54,389 = 187,698. This is the “consolidated vote”. OK… now do that for every plancha. Then apply the d’Hondt law as usual. Assign seats to those candidates getting the most individual votes.
This system would therefore be classified as “open list PR” with absolutely no chance for the party to weight candidates–which candidates from the list are elected is determined exclusively by the electorate. One thing to note is that because not everybody uses all his/her personal votes, a person casting all personal votes possible actually casts more than one vote, in effect. Example: say that in Guayas (18 seats) voters voting nominally vote, on average, for 8 candidates (about what the real number was). This makes the weighting factor 1/8 or .125. But I choose to vote for everyone on my party’s list (18 people). That’s .125*18 or 2.25 votes for my party! Huh…
Disclaimer: I pieced all this together from information I could find, which means errors are very possible. Sources include the Ecuadorian TSE, especially the PDF files found under each province, and a Letter to the Editor from an Ecuadorian newspaper. However, I couldn’t locate the actual legislation anywhere.
Seed planted by Alex — 02 December 2006 @ 22:24
No sooner do I say I can’t find it, then I find it (if you can read Spanish)…
Registro Oficial, May 11, 2006
Seed planted by Alex — 02 December 2006 @ 22:29