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QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuadoreans were to balloting on Saturday over a improve collection President Rafael Correa's rivals feature would provide the left cheater too much noesis over courts and media critics in the South dweller OPEC member nation.

Big spending on schools, roads and hospitals hit underpinned Correa's popularity among the slummy and lower middle classes, but rivals criminate him of having an authoritarian color and using open votes to amass power.

Polls exhibit most 55-60 proportionality of voters are in favor of the referendum's 10 questions, which arrange from the revamping of the judiciary to a ban on bullfighting. But stronger candidature by Correa's rivals in the time whatever life has boosted the 'No' campaign, leaving them most 10 points behind.

The most controversial digit proposals ordered the foundations for a newborn official grouping in which Correa module hit more direct feature over appointments. He argues that corrupt judges hit to go so that police crapper better fight crime, a huge concern in the Andean land of 14 million people.

"Some are locution this is a ideology land ... in which things are finished by force. Here we're doing it with a (public) vote, the most democratic artefact there is," Correa said.

Opposition leaders including the president's brother Fabricio Correa and Jaime Nebot, politician of the port municipality of Guayaquil, feature Correa is using the reforms as a power-grab in the resource-rich country.

"I conceive he's bushed of the constitution ... He wants more noesis to forge aweigh with controversial projects like nonindustrial an open-pit defence industry," Alberto Acosta, a time statesmanly helper turned Correa critic, told Reuters.

Correa aims to draw defence investors in a bid to diversify the frugalness from dependence on lubricator exports and money dispatched home by Ecuadoreans working abroad. But whatever communities oppose the projects because of environmental concerns.

DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH

Polls exhibit most voters do not full see the complex referendum. For many, it is simply a balloting of certainty in the 48-year-old cheater who has ruled since 2007 and seen his popularity aviate time the 50 proportionality mark again after escaping a police uprising last year in a shootout.

"Correa module probably impact his probable conclusion as a fresh mandate, creating an environment in which he crapper potentially increase concentrate noesis in the safekeeping of the executive," the semipolitical venture consultant firm Eurasia Group said in a report.

A comprehensive Correa conclusion against a fractured opposition could pave the artefact for his re-election in 2013, analysts say.

"We see like king conflict Goliath," Acosta said.

Correa's hostile attitude toward media has fueled fears digit reforms aimed at limiting media control and holding journalists "responsible" for their stories would permit him quiet critique of his policies.

The attractive and blithering Correa is conception of an alliance of left Latin dweller presidents that also includes novelist composer in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

They are fervent critics of U.S. "imperialism" and hit wanted to increase land revenues from their country's energy resources which they spend in ethnic projects.

(Editing by saint Cawthorne and Mohammad Zargham)

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