  The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do
business, but also the way we perform daily activities. In fact, the past
Presidential elections in the United States as well as those in Great Britain
(Brexit) and in Colombia (peace agreement referendum) are proof that social
media play an important part in modern politics. In fact, this digital
political field is filled by political movements and political candidates
looking for popular support (number of followers), regular citizens' messages
discussing social issues (trending topics flooding social media), or even
political propaganda in favor or against politicians or political movements
(advertisement). One of the issues with social media in this era is the
presence of automatic accounts (bots) that artificially fill accounts with fake
followers, create false trending topics, and share fake news or simply flood
the net with propaganda. All this artificial information may influence people
and sometimes may even censor people's real opinions undermining their freedom
of speech. In this paper, we propose a methodology to track elections and a set
of tools used to collect and analyze election data. In particular, this paper
discusses our experiences during the Presidential Elections in Ecuador held in
2017. In fact, we show how all candidates prepared an online campaign in social
media (Twitter) and how the political campaign altered a common follower rate
subscription. We discuss that the high presence of followers during the period
between the first and second round of elections may be altered by automatic
accounts. Finally, we use bot detection systems and gathered more than 30,000
political motivated bots. In our data analysis, we show that these bots were
mainly used for propaganda purposes in favor or against a particular candidate.
