Environmental activists are up in arms after Ecuador’s National Election Council disallowed hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition to oppose opening up Yasuni National Park for further oil exploration – there will be no referendum on the matter.

The group Yasunidos turned in 850,000 signatures on the petition that tells the government that more oil drilling in Yasuni would damage one of the world’s richest areas of biodiversity.  The park is home to a massive variety of plants and wildlife found nowhere else in the world.  Its human inhabitants include the Huaorani, and other indigenous people, who had virtually no contact with the outside world until recent decades.

But the electoral authorities validated less than 360,000 petition signatures.  That’s well short of the 583,323 required to force a national referendum on the matter.  The others – roughly half a million – were tossed out for various irregularities.  These included repetition, as the authorities say some names were repeated up to nine times.  Some were determined to be the signatures of non-voting minors.  Others were fictional names, such as “Bruce Wayne” and “Darth Vader”.

But Yasunidos says the council was biased against the petition from the start and went too far.

“Almost seven out of 10 signatures were thrown in the bin,” the group said in a statement on social media.  “The council talks about irregularities.  We talk about fraud.”

President Rafael Correa had previously struck deals with the major western powers to pay Ecuador to protect Yasuni, but the big economies never paid up.  Correa needs that money for fighting poverty and social programs.

Yasunidos vowed to take the issue to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.