Near-tie election deepens Mexico’s crisis

On Monday, preliminary results seemed to give the victory by a small margin to the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderón. He had 14,027,214 votes, or 36.38 percent, ahead of Andrés Lopez Obrador, candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who had 13,624,506 votes, or 35.34 percent of the total. Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) received 21.57 percent of the vote. Two other parties, Nueva Alianza (a split-off from the PRI) and the Democratic-Peasant Alternative (ADC) plus independent candidates received about 4.5 percent of the vote.

Lopez Obrador challenged the results, however, claiming that some three million votes had not been counted, based on the difference between the reported number of voters and the number of votes counted for president. On Wednesday, it was announced that indeed there were 2.5 million votes, from 11,184 precincts, that had purposely not been counted on the grounds that they were “too inconsistent” to be included in the preliminary count. When those votes are included, preliminary results reduced the margin between both candidates to 0.64 percent, some 250,000 votes. By late in the day, the results appeared to have handed the lead to Lopez Obrador, by fully two percentage points.

The accusations of fraud do not stop there. La Jornada, a Mexico City daily, charged authorities with having dumped ballots in a city landfill and compared it to similar events that occurred in July 1988 when—as is now widely acknowledged—the PRI fraudulently engineered a victory for its candidate Carlos Salinas over the PRD’s Cuahutemco Cárdenas. The ten ballot boxes belonged to four different precincts, three that voted for Lopez Obrador, one that voted for Calderón.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/mexi-j06.shtml