MEXICO: Court Reviews Claims of Election Fraud

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Adrián Reyes

MEXICO CITY, Jul 20 2006 (IPS) - A high federal court in Mexico is reviewing the leftist opposition’s claims of fraud in the Jul. 2 presidential elections, while election observers and independent experts point to irregularities and suspicious developments seen before, during and after election day.

According to the charges of fraud, the federal social programme Oportunidades was used to pressure actual or potential beneficiaries to vote for the governing party candidate, Felipe Calderón.

The leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which is demanding a vote-by-vote recount, also maintains that hundreds of polling stations showed more ballots cast than the number of registered voters. In addition, the party complains that the business community and sectors of the Catholic Church aggressively campaigned against its candidate, Andrés López Obrador.

The official tally showed that the conservative ruling National Action Party’s (PAN) Calderón defeated former Mexico City mayor López Obrador by a narrow margin of 0.58 percent.

Alicia Alonso with Civic Alliance, a non-governmental election watchdog organisation that formed part of the nearly 24,000 independent observers during the elections, told IPS that prior to Jul. 2, her group found evidence that the Oportunidades social assistance programme was being used to coerce people to vote for Calderón.

“We cannot maintain that generalised fraud was committed, but we can state that irregularities which could influence the final outcome were committed,” she said.

Alonso said that several weeks before the elections, Civic Alliance carried out 11,500 interviews among beneficiaries of the Oportunidades programme in 23 of Mexico’s 31 states, and that respondents told them that the authorities had made it clear that they had to vote for Calderón in order to keep their benefits.

The national coordinator of Oportunidades, Rogelio Gómez Hermosillo, denied that the programme was used for electoral ends, although he admitted that the government had stepped up support in poor urban areas ahead of the elections. He said, however, that “we told (the beneficiaries) that this was not done for electoral purposes and that they were free to vote how they chose.”

Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Senator Carlos Rojas, who ran Oportunidades’ predecessor, the National Solidarity Programme, under the Carlos Salinas administration (1988-1994), said the current government of Vicente Fox was using social aid to pressure people to vote for Calderón.

In a televised debate in which Gómez Hermosillo took part, Rojas held up a letter in which the PAN hopeful for mayor of Mexico City urged the leaders of civil organisations that benefit from the Social Development Secretariat (ministry) social programmes to vote for the ruling party.

Social Development Secretary Josefina Vázquez Mota stepped down on Jan. 6 to run Calderón’s campaign. At that time, the opposition complained that the former official had full control of the registration lists of beneficiaries of public social assistance programmes, which she denied.

According to Civic Alliance, Catholic priests in the northern state of Nuevo León backed Calderón’s campaign platform and urged their faithful not to vote for candidates who advocated the decriminalisation of abortion and laws that would benefit homosexuals – an undisguised reference to López Obrador.

The Civic Alliance also protested an offensive by the Business Coordinating Council (CCE) consisting of radio and TV spots against the left-leaning candidate, who was compared in the ads to Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chávez and described as a threat to Mexico’s stability.

In response to questions from IPS, CCE chairman Alberto Núñez Esteva defended the campaign, which he said was merely aimed at raising awareness among voters so that they would vote responsibly.

López Obrador, the candidate of the Por el Bien de Todos (For the Good of All) coalition, made up of the PRD and the small Trabajo and Convergencia parties, claims that more than 15 million people voted for him on Jul. 2, and has warned that he will not give up the fight for a recount.

On the night of the elections, the Federal Electoral Institute’s (IFE) Preliminary Electoral Results Programme (PREP), designed to carry out a quick vote count, showed that the race was extremely tight, but reflected statistical patterns that were questioned by experts.

Three days later, IFE declared Calderón the winner with a difference of 0.58 percent of the votes, although only the Electoral Court has the authority to announce the final outcome.

Víctor Romero Rochín, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Physics Institute, and Bolívar Huerta, a science professor at the university, said PREP’s vote tally reflected “atypical” and “unlikely” statistical patterns.

In an interview with a national radio station, W Radio, Rochín explained that he and other researchers carried out their own count of the votes, based on the results that IFE made available on its web site, and that they found “strange patterns.”

“Statistically speaking, the results fall outside of any reasonable pattern. Either there was meddling, or I don’t know what happened,” he said.

For his part, Huerto said the possibility that the PREP vote-counting software was targeted by a hacker should not be ruled out, given that “there is a lot of evidence of irregularities in the vote count.” He suggested that a recount be carried out using a system other than the one employed by IFE, in order to guarantee transparency.

But PREP general coordinator René Miranda said the outcome of the quick vote count was unusual because no candidate had ever won by such a small margin.

To back up his claim that he won the elections, López Obrador presented video recordings in which individuals (poll workers, according to the PRD) can allegedly be seen illegally stuffing ballot boxes.

The leftist candidate said there are one and a half million extra votes that cannot be accounted for. To illustrate, he pointed out that in two voting precincts alone – San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León – the number of votes by far exceeded the number of registered voters.

In San Luis Potosí, 1,449 ballots were counted, although only 412 people were registered in that precinct, while in Nuevo León the votes totalled 960, compared to just 603 names on the voting registry.

According to López Obrador, the total number of ballots counted in favour of Calderón exceeded the real number of votes that he took.

IFE admitted last Sunday that inconsistencies in terms of the number of ballots were found in 95 percent of the 2,870 ballot boxes opened during the preliminary vote count on election day.

The Electoral Court has until Aug. 31 to rule on the legal challenges brought by the opposition, and must declare the president-elect by Sept. 6.

Analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio warned that the tension could continue to escalate, and recommended for the good of the country – and of Calderón himself – that a ballot-by-ballot recount be undertaken, in order to legitimate the elections.