Leftist candidate worries Mexican elite

Since Sunday night, dlowan.

Now they're in the process of reviewing every prescint act.

When this finishes, the loser will mount protests (actually, as I write, the PRD people are already blocking IFE, with t-shirts of the President of the IFE Council that were not made yesterday), and will ask the Federal Electoral Tribunal to define the race.

This is one of the expected scenarios before the election.

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Wed, Jul 5, 2006
Contact: [email protected] AIM: heysploid Support Blogger's Rights!July 05, 2006 at 07:10 PM

Mexico prez results flip!
Mexico's "too close to call" presidential election is getting stranger by the hour, with 2.5 million missing ballots discovered Tuesday, other ballots found dumped at landfills, accusations of widespread electoral fraud and a stunning recount that shows leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with a sudden lead.

Felipe Calderon, the oil executive and U.S.-backed successor chosen by outgoing President Vicente Fox, claimed a narrow victory of just 0.6% after Sunday's election. But Obrador immediately demanded a recount, pointing to exit polls that showed he should've won the presidency by more than half a million votes.

Tonight, 69% of the ballots have reportedly been recounted, giving Obrador a 2.17% lead with 36.81% over Calderon's 34.64%.

According to Reuters, "A main concern is that 42 million people voted but only 38.5 million votes were tallied in the preliminary count that Calderon is basing his claims of victory on."

The news agency said Lopez Obrador had a 2.6% lead this afternoon.

NarcoNews.com reports that the ruling PAN party is fighting the recount at every level.

"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 Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and many outraged citizens armed with video cameras have besieged the 300 recount locales demanding an actual ballot-by-ballot recount."

Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, is hugely popular with ordinary Mexicans. Vicente Fox's government actually tried to put Obrador in prison over some city zoning dispute -- just to keep Obrador from running for president.

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Wow. Whats going on?

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Reuters:

"Mexico's leftist presidential candidate held a thin, 2.19 percentage point lead over his conservative rival on Wednesday with results in from three-quarters of polling stations in the recount of a fiercely contested election."

Source

With three-quarters of the recount in already...

If it ends up indeed a 2% Obrador lead, instead of a 0,6% Calderon lead as the results were counted the first time round, does that mean that there was significant fraud after all? El Pohl, whats your friend in Rosarito say?

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In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there's a report from an election observer of the International Institute for Democracy.

Surreally, he calls Obrador a "liberal", but that's probably just to get some kind of parallel for the folks in Milwaukee.

He has three main complaints:

- re lack of ballots

Quote:

[..] casillas especiales or special polling stations exist for voters who are away from their regular polling stations. These have historically presented problems in prior elections, including the 2000 presidential election.

The principal problem is that each of these special polling stations can only issue 750 ballots. There have been efforts to increase this number, but it hasn't occurred yet.

I witnessed one of these special polling stations where there were many, many voters beyond the 750 maximum. These people, therefore, were denied their right to vote.

- re the difficulty for Mexicans abroad to vote

Quote:

The issue of voting by Mexicans outside of Mexico also surfaced in almost all of our discussions.

Current Mexican law allows Mexicans to vote by mail, but only 38,000 of the roughly 4.2 million eligible voters used this means to vote.

This lack of participation is due to a provision that requires Mexicans living out of the country to go back to Mexico to register to vote by mail. This clearly is not practical or economical for the vast majority of Mexicans residing outside of Mexico.

Given that the current count indicates a margin of roughly 200,000 votes between the top two vote-getters, if the 4.2 million eligible voters living outside the country would have cast ballots, they could have significantly affected the outcome of the election.

- re election commercials

Quote:

In the week prior to the presidential election, our group of observers found that certain commercials that were being run by the conservative PAN and its business supporters were not allowed, supporting the allegation that PAN was not playing fair.

Indeed, many acknowledged that the dirty campaign tactics of PAN hurt Lopez Obrador. [..] Thus, I was quite surprised see a full-page ad in a principal Mexican newspaper on election day that did not identify who paid for it and that clearly favored the conservative candidate.

This ad appeared even though, by law, all campaigning was supposed to have ceased the Wednesday before the Sunday election.

He concludes:

Quote:

It is difficult to say when the Mexican presidential election will be resolved. But it is clear to me that whoever wins will have to govern a country where more than 60% of voters did not support his candidacy.

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Jeez. Lots of misinformation going around.

1. No ballots found on dumps.
What was found on a dump are sheets that are put over the walls in the prescints with the results of that particular prescinct.
Absolutely unimportant.

2. The district by district official count is taking place today, and will follow until at least tomorrow.
The data is flowing with the pro-AMLO prescincts first, because of the PRD strategy of delaying, by lengthy discussion, the aprooval and delivery of data from pro-Calderón prescincts.
According to people I know from IFE, the map shows the strategy very clearly.
The tactical idea is that the population go to bed with AMLO on the lead, wake up with a tie and claim fraud.

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The assestment about Mexicans abroad having to come back to Mexico to register is false.
Once you register, it's permanent. I vote with my 1991 voting card.
My friend cychess, who lives in Vancouver (and voted for Lopez Obrador) didn't have to go back to Mexico.
If you never had a voting card, you have to register in Mexico, though.

---

Yes, this was a mud-slinging campaign. From all 3 main candidates.

.....

And yes, the winner-take-all (and I mean ALL) Presidential system is flopped in a multiparty system.

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fbaezer wrote:

Jeez. Lots of misinformation going around.

All part of the deal when you're having contested elections - they wouldnt be complete without it! :wink:

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My Rosarito friend if jumping of happiness.

What fbaezer says its true though, even with 83.53% of the ballots, and a 1.82% lead for AMLO, everything could change in the next couple of hours. Most of the ballots pending come from the north, with few from the southern peninsula. Calderón could still win, but I think that with less than the famous 0.6%.

Whatever the outcome today, this won't be the end of the story.

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edgarblythe wrote:

Wed, Jul 5, 2006
Contact: [email protected] AIM: heysploid Support Blogger's Rights!July 05, 2006 at 07:10 PM

Felipe Calderon, the oil executive and U.S.-backed successor chosen by outgoing President Vicente Fox, claimed a narrow victory of just 0.6% after Sunday's election...

According to Reuters, "A main concern is that 42 million people voted but only 38.5 million votes were tallied in the preliminary count that Calderon is basing his claims of victory on."

Calderón was never an oil executive.
Mexico's oil is nationalized since 1938. Pemex is the State company and has the monopoly.
Calderón was briefly Minister of Energy in the Fox administration.

As for the "missing" votes, I had written yesterday

fbaezer wrote:

The famous 2.5 million votes are in. And Calderón lead is smaller: 257 thousand votes. 0.62 %

Still one million to be counted.

Read this (in Spanish)

Elecciones 2006: especulación y realidad - Ciro Murayama (asesor de Woldenberg)

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For our english speaking friends, the story of the missing votes is an interesting one. As explained in that link, the IFE - referee - describes an anomaly in an act (report of the number of votes in the booth) when it is not properly filled, among some other causes.

An example is when the booth representatives dont type "zero" and leave blank the field where you need to put the number of votes a party received.
Situations like this had 2.5 million ballots on hold. Adding those, Calderón's extraofficial advantage was reduced to 0.6% or so.

The IFE's website DID include this anomalities, but they didn't appear up front. You could say that Ugalde didn't explained this problem UNTIL being questioned by PRD's officials.

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I'll be extremely bold.
This will be the final percentages after the recount:

Calderón 36.3%
AMLO 35.5%

(At this moment, with 87% of the prescincts counted, AMLO leads by 1.4%: the majority of the prescincts to be counted are from PAN strongholds: San Luis, Querétaro, Aguascalientes, North Baja California).

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Well well, 90.07%, AMLO is keeping the 1.24% difference!

Even with the northern states pending, or part of them (I guess rural areas), will Calderón be able of reverting the votes? AMLO lost "just" around 1.25% since there was only 65% of the ballots counted.

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Báez, I still ask myself why Castañeda couldn't run for President. He had my vote ever since the beginning.

Anyways, 95% and a really really small 0.56% lead difference.

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"With nearly 98 percent of the vote tallies recounted, Calderon had 35.62 percent of the vote, while Lopez Obrador had 35.57. It was the first time since counting began early Wednesday that Calderon held the lead."

Source (WaPo)

"Hundreds of Felipe Calderon supporters gathered at his campaign headquarters cheered wildly with the news, while his opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, remained holed up at his home awaiting the final vote count."

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As told, AMLO supporters delayed the vote count in Calderón's strongholds. With 99% of the vote count, Calderón leads by 0.45% and the remaining prescincts are almost exclusively from Colima (where Calderón won) and Guanajuato (where he gathered nearly 60% of the vote).

AMLO will give a press conference in about an hour and a half.
He'll probably ask his supporters to join him in civil resistance.
If so, it'll be a huge mistake.

----

Well el_pohl, Castañeda did not have a party. He had the same problem as Dr. Simi. Laughing

I do believe registrating parties should be easier. But then there's the problem of public financing of parties.
Castañeda is a bright man with a good sense of humor (yes, I also know him since we were students), but would've made a terrible president (his whimsy character, his little will to listen).

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We should americanize our election periods. It amuses me how they use little to no visual publicity other than in the media.

Not having a party s*cks. But we still have our right to vote and be voted, huh?

Anyways, Calderón wins again and the Stock Market emulates Mr. Clean's jumps of glee. So funny how they synchronize.

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99.9% of prescincts.

Calderón 35.9%
López Obrador 35.3%

Yep, the same 0.6% difference on the PREP.

AMLO, of course, has not acknowledged defeat and called his followers to a demonstration on Saturday.
Things go according to the script.

---

The Stock Market behaviour reminds me of a phrase by post-war Italian finance minister Einaudi about financial speculators: "They have the memory of an elephant, the heart of a chicken and the speed of a rabbit".

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Final Results:

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa; PAN: 15'000,284 votes: 35.9%
Andrés Manuel López Obrador; PRD, PT, CD: 14'756,350 votes: 35.3%
Roberto Madrazo Pintado; PRI, PVEM: 9'301,441 votes, 22.3%.
Patricia Mercado Castro; PASC: 1'128,850 votes, 2.7%.
Roberto Campa Cifrián; PANAL; 401, 804 votes, 1.0%

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Now that's democracy!

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Leftist candidate worries Mexican elite

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