Election Results!!

Well, to nobody's surprise, they called the election for Correa. What did surprise me, though, was that they called it with a fair amount of time left before the polls closed. [Edit: it occurred to me today that I'd forgotten about the one hour time difference, so the polls had in fact closed throughout mainland Ecuador before this all happened.] I had fallen asleep in the living room this afternoon and woke up at around 4:30 to see Correa thanking a mob outside Carondelet on TV. The polls weren't going to close until 5, but they were already showing results and such and Correa began his official acceptance speech five or ten minutes before 5. It seemed to me that Gutierrez split a lot of the vote that could have gone to Lasso in the Amazon region, but other than that, I wasn't actually paying much attention.

The real excitement came earlier today, when I accompanied my host mother to the voting station. There are several voting stations around town, and which one you need to go to is based on the first letter of your last name. That meant that my host father (Buenaño) got to go to a station relatively close to the house while my host mother (Zavala) had to trek all the way out to the airport. I went with her since I have an easier time communicating with her. Once we got to the airport, we entered a large room with little tables set up around the periphery and some people sitting around towards one side. Here, voting was further divided by sex and then name. On each table was a little cardboard trifold, like the kind US kids do elementary school science fair projects on except smaller, with "The vote is private" printed in Spanish on the outside. Once people had filled out their ballots, they were placed in cardboard boxes with a transparent window in the side through which markings were completely visible.

The most interesting thing to me, though, was the high military presence in the polling place. There were a few army guys near the door and numerous naval offers stationed around the room. And every single one of them had a semiautomatic rifle. I didn't even notice at first, because none of the Ecuadorians were noticing. But yep, there were guns everywhere and nobody giving them any mind. I had planned to take a few photos of the polling place when we were on our way out, but I decided I didn't really want to end up on the wrong end of one of those weapons, so I just took one super surreptitious photo in the direction of the only military guy not paying attention to the action:

I have no idea why maybe twenty rifles are needed in a polling station while when the President himself visits, all you need are a few cops and two guys with secret service-style earpieces. I asked my host mother why they had so many guns there and she was entirely dismissive of it, saying essentially, "Oh, you know, order and discipline and such." Nobody gives people standing around with guns a second thought here. But I don't think I had even seen a weapon like one of these in real life before in the States.

Anyway, afterwards, we made one more stop because my host mother needed to get her new voter card laminated. This happened at a street-side cart with a lamination machine and cost 50 cents. Since the introduction of the new constitution, the main form of ID has become this card that you get each four years that has a small amount of personal information on it and verifies that you did in fact vote in the last elections. I asked what happens if you don't vote (which is illegal) and it turns out the punishment is a $40 fine and presumably some trouble using the card from the previous four years.

Anyway, that's the scoop on the elections. I'm a little disappointed that they're over since from now on life will probably be substantially more boring... Oh well...