Fraud Concerns on Eve of Mexico Elections

By Emilio Godoy Reprint | | Print | |En español

MEXICO CITY, Jun 29 2012 (IPS) - Political patronage, busing of voters, bribery, vote-buying and coercion are deep-rooted practices in Mexico and a source of unease for observers and citizens preparing for the Sunday Jul. 1 presidential elections.

Website for citizens to upload their electoral sheet photographs and calculations. Credit: Foto X Casilla

“All the conditions are in place for (electoral fraud) to occur. We are concerned that there could be vote buying, voter coercion, and excessive numbers of observers registered in some regions, whose role is not clear,” Bernardo Portillo, spokesman for the Comité Conciudadano para la Observación Electoral (CCOE – Citizens’ Election Observation Committee), told IPS.

The Committee, which groups 17 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), analysed gender representation, transparency and internal democracy in political parties taking part in the electoral campaign which began in March.

The CCOE asked the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the autonomous public body responsible for organising the elections, to disseminate as widely as possible descriptions of election crimes, as well as the complaints procedures.

IFE stressed that gifts and construction materials offered by parties to voters during the campaign were paid for “out of our taxes” and should not affect voter independence. Buying and coercing votes are electoral procedure offences under the criminal code, it said.

On Sunday, voters will elect 500 lawmakers to the lower house of Congress, 128 senators, and the Mexican president for a six-year term. Fifteen states are also holding local elections, and seven will be electing governors.

The new Congress will be installed Sept. 1, and whoever is voted in as successor to current conservative President Felipe Calderón will take office Dec. 1.

There are 84 million eligible voters in this country of 112 million people; an estimated 20 million are expected to abstain.

“Irregularities have occurred during the campaign, arising from the political culture of the parties and candidates who infringe the laws,” María Amparo Casar, of the department of political studies at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), told IPS.

“Some shortcomings are due to imperfect laws, and should be corrected on the basis of experience in these elections,” Casar said.

IFE authorised 31,400 observers from civil society organisations, over 500 of whom are foreigners. The United Nations Development Programme and the Mexican government earmarked over five million dollars for oversight of the elections, divided between 50 organisations.

Nearly 90 percent of the polling stations in the country’s 300 electoral districts have officials – randomly selected by IFE – appointed to serve and process the voters who attend, alongside delegates from at least two political parties.

However, according to the CCOE, only 18 districts have the seven officials needed for each of their polling stations, and in nine other districts less than 20 percent of the polling stations have the required number of officials.

Presidential candidate Enrique Peña, the head of the opposition alliance Compromiso por México (Commitment for Mexico), a coalition of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Green Party, is the front-runner.

He is followed by leftwing candidate Andrés López Obrador of the Progressive Movement, made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Labour Party and the Citizens’ Movement.

In third place in the polls is Josefina Vázquez, the only woman in the presidential race, who belongs to the rightwing governing National Action Party (PAN).

The campaign ended on Wednesday Jun. 27, when a ban on political advertising and the publication of opinion polls went into effect.

IFE distributed some 120 million dollars among the political parties to finance electoral advertising, and a 2007 law limited spending by the parties.

But the campaign was fraught with denunciations of violations of the spending limit, which only incur a fine, and of attempts to manipulate votes.

Since March, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Electoral Crimes has opened 542 investigations into anomalies and has prosecuted 322 people. This Sunday it will deploy 116 mobile units nationwide to attend to complaints.

“During the campaign, all actions can be reconstructed and tracked,” Rodrigo Morales, the head of Consultar, a consultancy that evaluates public policies, told IPS. The point is for the special prosecutor’s office to be able to take action, he added.

Portillo said: “We ought to recognise that the consequences of electoral malpractice will be particularly harmful in the states, where governors are like viceroys.”

This is the climate in which civil society organisations are preparing to monitor the elections.

A project called Foto X Casilla (“a photo from every polling station”) is urging voters to take a photo of the sheet of results each polling station must display at the end of the voting day, and to post the photo and the vote count on the project’s web page.

“We would like to get as many photos as possible of the sheets from different polling stations so that we can compare them with the preliminary results. It’s a method of safeguarding our votes. If we have a lot of photos, we can carry out something like a parallel quick count. It all depends on the people,” Víctor Romero, spokesman for the initiative, told IPS.

“We are going to be very careful to say that this is not a representative sample,” he said. “We will check for arithmetic errors and inconsistencies. We want to make sure that the results displayed at the polling stations are actually incorporated into the count. If they match, it is a strong validation of the electoral process,” said Romero, a professor at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM).

No one has forgotten the 2006 elections, when the result was contested by several organisations for alleged fraud, and Calderón beat Lopez Obrador by the narrowest of margins, barely 0.56 percent of the vote.

López Obrador alleged that the ballot boxes and the electoral results sheets had been manipulated in favour of Calderón.

On that occasion, IFE was under scrutiny. Now it will publish the certified electoral results on the internet, organise a quick count, and announce the preliminary results at midnight on Sunday.