In this specific scenario, each null vote of a Country Email List voter who previously voted for Pérez was, in the general trend, one vote less for Arauz, and therefore the beneficiary was Lasso in the calculation of the official result according to the Ecuadorian Country Email List electoral system. The second round and the massive invalid vote In the Ecuadorian electoral system, null and blank votes are not part of the total "valid votes" used to calculate the official election Country Email List results. Spoiled ballots are ballots intentionally marked to be invalid. Blank Country Email List votes are ballots intentionally deposited in the ballot box without marking any of the options.
The valid votes are the sum of the votes Country Email List received by all the candidates in the contest. Blank votes and invalid votes are not included in this sum, and the total number of valid votes is the denominator used to calculate the Country Email List percentage of the final result for each candidate. For example, the 32.7% obtained by Arauz in the first round is obtained by dividing the total number of votes received by him (3,033,791 votes) by the total Country Email List number of votes received by all 16 candidates who participated in the first round ( 9,272,034 valid votes).
Null and blank votes are not Country Email List included in this calculation and, by mathematical verification, the higher the number of null and blank votes, the lower the total number of valid votes, and the higher the percentage of official Country Email List results calculated for each candidate. The particularity of this way of calculating the official result is that, in a specific context of the second round, where invalid votes selectively harm one candidate, the favored one is the other candidate: not because he receives more votes, but because he Country Email List benefits from the calculation. What actually happened?