In Mexico, 2.5 Million Missing Votes Reappear: Calderón’s Official Margin to 0.6 percent

By Al Giordano
Part I of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin

July 5, 2006

Today, in Mexico, begins a “recount” of votes cast in Sunday’s presidential election… in which the umpires are refusing to recount the votes.

Election authorities of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) closed ranks on Tuesday with the National Action Party (PAN) of President Vicente Fox and candidate Felipe Calderón to oppose the actual recounting the votes. This, on the heels of Tuesday’s “discovery” of 2.5 million votes hidden by IFE since Sunday’s election, added to a growing body of evidence – and corresponding public distrust in the institutions – that a gargantuan electoral fraud has been perpetrated.

The partial “recount” began at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, in Mexico’s 300 election districts – each with an average of 400 polling places and 140,000 votes to tabulate – and sparks are already flying over the struggle to conduct an authentic count in the sunlight of public scrutiny. Attorneys and party bosses of the PAN – whose triumphalism has turned to visible panic in recent hours – have orders from headquarters to universally oppose the reopening of any ballot boxes and subsequent public accounting of the actual number of votes cast for each candidate. On the other side, representatives of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and many outraged citizens armed with video cameras have besieged the 300 recount locales demanding an actual ballot-by-ballot recount.

This first stage of the process is likely to take days: Results from more than 11,000 precincts (the ones hidden by IFE – in most of them, López Obrador won the vote) that must be recounted, vote-by-vote, in accordance with Mexican electoral law. That is an average of almost 40 polling places per district. And with two well-organized sides battling over whether the votes will be counted aloud, combined with the stonewalling incompetence that has been IFE’s trademark, an already fragile process is coming apart at the seams.

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