Defying a strong wave of conservative electoral victories throughout the region, Ecuador's election declared left-wing Lenin (yes, Lenin) Moreno the winner over his more conservative rival, Guillermo Lasso.  This, despite a shriveling economy and a big oil bust that has deprived government coffers of money.

Sure, you can just dismiss it as "Ecuadoreans are stupid" and "people get the government they deserve."  You can even add "keep the illegals out."

But in this case, the argument for naked leftist fraud is fairly strong.

The Washington Post has a first-rate report showing several details about how bad it was:

With more than 97 percent of voting acts counted, Moreno garnered 51 percent of the vote while conservative banker Guillermo Lasso stood at just under 49 percent. A difference of about 224,000 votes separated the two candidates with a smaller number of ballots still left to count.

The Post reports that exit polls showed Lasso winning.  One of them was from a pollster that predicted with pinpoint accuracy the results of the primary.

The Post also noted that the government took three days to tally the primary results but had its narrowest of victories all ready within hours of the final election.

The Post also reported that there was vote-flipping in one precinct.

The mega-trends on voter direction, the economy, and the oil bust, as well as these Post details about the election itself, signal some hard questions that need to be resolved.

What's more, I met with Ecuadorean human rights activists last month in Washington, a city that has many Ecuadoreans and Ecuadorean-Americans, and they told me the government was using Venezuelan CNE election officials as advisers for their effort.  Those Chavista thugs are well known for just the sort of fraudulent moves described above, particularly vote-flipping.

Jimmy Carter was unavailable for comment.

There are some implications for the U.S. in this fraud-fest.  Number one: Julian Assange, the chief WikiLeaker holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy to tweak the U.S., is a happy man.  Had Lasso won, he would have been booted back to Sweden, where he is wanted on a rape charge (admittedly flimsy), which would open the door to him getting shipped to the states as soon as he touched down in Stockholm.

That ought to mean something to Democrats and the rabid left busy spinning conspiracy theories about Russia, because Assange of course, is the key to ascertaining Russian meddling in U.S. elections.  If Democrats are serious, they are going to demand this.  If they are not, well, they will wring their hands and put out press releases about human rights and rule of law.

How serious do you think they are?