1. The PRD could claim that certain polling sites were manipulated and call for the reopening of the ballot boxes at those sites for a vote-by-vote count.
2. The PRD could claim that the entire election should be annulled because cyberfraud was widespread and affected every polling site.
3. The PRD could claim that the entire election should be annulled because of cyberfraud and because of other factors.
Chief among those "other factors" is the annulment of more than 904,000 votes, 2.16 percent of all votes cast. While discussion of cyberfraud sounds as much Ohio 2004 as Florida 2000, it's annulment that really inspires a Tallahassee flashback.
Explains University of Texas political science professor Kenneth Greene, who has been in Mexico as an observer, "This election had the 'overvote' factor, similar to the butterfly ballot issue in Florida where people punched more than one option. Here people sometimes marked more than one box and so the IFE didn't know who to count it for and annulled it."
The Federal Electoral Institute, known by its acronym IFE, is controlled by appointees from Calderon's party, PAN, just as the chief vote-counter in Florida, Katharine Harris, was a member of George W. Bush's party. In fact in Mexico, the IFE has even tighter control than Harris had six years ago. "It's parallel to what happened in Palm Beach except that in Mexico only the IFE can count the votes, unlike in Florida where the lawyers and the party members got involved with counting."
Once Lopez Obrador presents his formal complaint, he may not have any better luck. The Federal Electoral Tribunal, which will review the complaint, contains no PRD affiliates.
PRD officials are unlikely, therefore, to persuade anyone in power of their arguments. They seem confident, however, that they can convince the public that something untoward happened in this election. Expert observers are skeptical.
Victor Manuel Alarcón, head of the sociology department at the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Iztapalapa, says the errors were likely human, a common occurrence with any non-digital voting system. "A lot of the people tallying the votes were poorly educated -- remember this country is poor -- so it's very possible the discrepancies between the PREP and the official count were their fault, not the result of fraud."
Despite a history of vote fraud, it's also difficult to reconcile the claims of manipulation with Mexico's revamped electoral institutions and voting procedures. While Mexico's electoral system has remained technologically simple, with voters using fat black crayons and paper instead of touch screens, it is also one of the most expensive and labor-intensive in the world. The government spent $1.2 billion this year in part to ensure that no polling site would have more than 300 voters assigned to it. In the 1990s, procedures were changed so that no party officials would work at polling sites. Parties are allowed to have representatives observing the procedures, but the sites themselves must be manned by ordinary citizens to create accountability.
According to Ulises Beltran, a professor of political science at CIDE, a leading graduate research institution in Mexico City, organized fraud is virtually impossible in contemporary Mexican elections because of all the safeguards. "To find enough evidence of fraud for Lopez Obrador to win," explains Beltran, "there would have to be 50,000 citizens involved with the conspiracy. The small size of our polling sites and the large number of citizens working in them should really prevent it."
Still, no matter how plausible or implausible the PRD's case turns out to be -- and enlisting the questionable Clinton Curtis on their behalf is hardly convincing -- 65 percent of the public voted for someone besides the election's declared winner. Some, at least, are likely to remain dubious about Calderon's victory. Cuahtemoc Cardenas, the founder of the PRD, who could make a much more compelling case that he was robbed of the presidency in the controversial election of 1988, argues that all questions must be answered for the sake of Mexico. "Without even being at fault," wrote Cardenas in a Friday editorial, "those who resist and oppose the clearing up of doubts awake unnecessary suspicions."
About the writer
Eliza Barclay is a freelance reporter based in Mexico City.
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