Plurality system & voting

Ecuador runs presidential elections through a plurality system. Candidates (usually 6-8) run for president and vice-president in the first round of voting. If a ticket wins with a simple majority, they are instantly elected as president and vice president. But, if a ticket has 40%+ of the votes, and the runner-up is 10%+ below, they are also elected. If not, there is a second round between the two tickets with the most votes.

I think the 40% rule leads to political parties arranging elections to stay in power. Let's assume there exists a socialist party that has been in power for over a decade. They want to win the upcoming elections, but their candidate is not popular enough to win with a simple majority in the first round. They aim to obtain 40% of the votes and make sure the other candidates are below 30%. Assuming this is a corrupt world, the socialist party can easily pay independent candidates to run in the election to take away votes from the strongest opposition candidate. Say the socialist candidate has 40% of the votes secured. For the other 60%, the opposition candidate could have around 30% of the votes, but there are 6 other candidates fighting for these votes. The independent candidates (paid off) only need 5%+ each to prevent the opposition candidate to achieve 30%. This would make the socialist candidate win only with 40% of the votes.

This happened in the 2017 presidential elections in Ecuador. The socialist candidate was not as popular as his predecessor. In fact, he did not get the 40% of the votes in the first round, and neither did the opposition candidate. In the second round, the socialist and the opposition candidate ran in a pairwise election. The socialist candidate won with 51%. There are allegations that the elections were rigged, as there were many inconsistencies (technical system went down for a few hours, contradicting statistics and reports). But maybe the socialist candidate was, in fact, the Condorcet winner as he obtained the most share of votes in both rounds. Either way, it is clear that Ecuador's plurality system could be used to favor political parties and corruption. Maybe Ecuador's government should consider implementing the Coombs method for future elections.