Arauz wins in Ecuador with 32.22% and there is technical tie in second place

Correist candidate Andrés Arauz has won this Sunday's presidential elections held in Ecuador with 32.22% of the valid votes, when the tally of polling station reports reached 96.81%. 

The result came as no surprise in Ecuador, where pre-election polls and exit polls indicated a difference of up to fifteen percentage points over the second candidate. 

The identity of the second candidate will have to be clarified in the coming days as the official result shows a technical tie between the centre-right Guillermo Lasso, who was the favourite to advance to the second round, and the indigenous environmentalist candidate Yaku Pérez. The former obtained 19.65% of the vote, while the latter beat him by six hundredths of a percentage point with 19.71%. 

This is too small a number of votes to decide who has come second and will go on to a second round, as the final count will take a few more days and the diaspora vote has yet to be counted. 

Just over 410,000 Ecuadorians living abroad were called to vote in these elections, in which the country was electing a president and vice-president, 137 members of the National Assembly and five members of the Andean Parliament. 

In the wake of the dead heat, Perez this morning questioned the results in Guayaquil and called for a recount. "We have participated in this electoral process demanding transparency, but despite the fact that the CNE's (National Electoral Council) quick count gave us second place, they are getting closer and it seems that the intention is to overtake us and leave us in third place," he said in a statement outside the headquarters of the movement he leads, Pachakutik, in Quito.

Pérez called on his supporters and voters to "be vigilant" and to mobilise so that "your will is not defrauded, that your will is respected", suggesting that the electoral body or some political power is seeking to modify the results. 

The conservative candidate, who was initially the favourite to go through to a second round behind Arauz, traditionally has a loyal vote in his city, Guayaquil, although it is not known whether that predicament would have been modified by the new political factor that Pérez represents. 

Ecuadorian law requires a run-off when the winner does not obtain an absolute majority or at least 40 per cent of the valid votes with a 10-point difference over the second candidate. 

The fragmentation of the vote has been due to the unprecedented number of candidates running in Sunday's elections, 16 presidential formulas. Xavier Hervás, Democratic Left candidate, came in fourth place with 16.01% of the vote. The other twelve candidates, all of them from the start with no real chance of a second round, share the vote: Pedro José Freile, 2.15%; Isidro Romero, 1.82%; former president Lucio Gutierrez, 1.76%; Gerson Almeida, 1.69%; and the only woman candidate, Ximena Peña, 1.53%. Seven other candidates received less than 1% of the vote.