The media rewrites history every day, and in so doing it often impedes our understanding of the present. Mexico’s presidential election of a week ago is a case in point. Press reports tell us that Felipe Calderón, the outgoing president from the PAN (National Action Party) “won the 2006 election by a narrow margin.” But this is not quite true, and without knowing what actually happened in 2006, it is perhaps more difficult to understand the widespread skepticism of the Mexican people as to the results of the current election. The official results show Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Neto winning 38.2 percent of the vote, to 31.6 percent for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and 25.4 percent for Josefina Vázquez Mota of the PAN. It does not help that the current election has been marred by widespread reports of vote-buying.
“It was neither a clean nor fair election,” said Eduardo Huchim of the Civic Alliance, a Mexican watchdog group funded by the United Nations Development Program. This was bribery on a vast scale, said Huchim, a former [Federal Electoral Institute] official. “It was perhaps the biggest operation of vote-buying and coercion in the country’s history.”
It may not have been enough to swing the presidential race, but for those who know what actually happened in 2006, the voters’ lack of faith in the results is completely understandable. The official margin of difference between Calderón and López Obrador of the PRD, who was also the PRD’s nominee in the 2006 election, was 0.58 percent. But there were massive irregularities. The most prominent, which was largely ignored in the international press, was the “adding-up” problem at nearly half of the polling places. According to Mexico’s electoral procedures, each polling place gets a fixed number of blank ballots. After the vote, the number of remaining blank ballots plus the number of ballots cast are supposed to add up to the original blank ballots. For almost half of the polling places, this did not happen [PDF].
But it got worse than that. Because of public pressure, the Mexican electoral authorities did two partial recounts of the vote. The second one was done for a huge sample: they recounted 9 percent of the ballots. But without offering any explanation, the electoral authorities refused to release the results of the recount to the public.
Full Article: Mark Weisbrot: Mexico Still Far From Fair Elections.
