Fraud in the Land of Telenovelas, Part II

Here's a Newsday article from Friday about the Mexican Election. Notice how the Republicans' 2000 strategy of "We'll just pretend like we're the winners and they're the sore losers and both the Democrats and the media will drop it because they don't want to look like that" doesn't work in other countries. Must be nice.

It may come as a surprise to many Americans to hear that there is no winner yet in the Mexican presidential election. Although most news sources in the United States rushed to declare conservative Felipe Calderón the victor last week, when the completed vote count showed him with a 0.6-percent advantage, the race has not officially been called. With the work of Mexico's vote-counting body now done, the country's Federal Elections Court is responsible for verifying the count, resolving any outstanding disputes and announcing an official winner.

Part of Calderón's campaign strategy has been to behave as if the election is a done deal, and he is already president. We shouldn't play into this game by misunderstanding Mexico's electoral process or prematurely insisting on a victor.

Unlike the United States, Mexico has an extended lame-duck period after its elections. The next president will not take office until December. Moreover, Mexican law gives the Federal Elections Court until the first week of September to reach its decision. The court has the power to open ballot boxes, to mandate a vote-by-vote recount and even to order a new election. A full recount is now one of the central demands of progressive candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador's campaign, with significant support in the wider electorate.

By taking advantage of the time afforded it and creating as much transparency as possible in its review, the Federal Elections Court can work to restore public confidence in the country's democratic institutions - something diminished by perceptions of irregularities in last week's vote-counting.

And then get this.

Among other respected institutions, the Catholic Church in Mexico has defended López Obrador's right to contest the vote count before the Federal Elections Court and even to call for public protests - such as the one that drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to Mexico City's central square last Saturday. Peaceful protests are indicative of an engaged citizenry unwilling to accept the type of chicanery that long dominated the country's political system.

The Catholic Church doesn't just fall behind what the manly, family-first conservatives say. Again...must be nice.

While not many are talking about this anymore, there are still a few. Avedon points me to both an interesting HuffPo post by Terry Fox...

What if Al Gore had been more like Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador?

...

I'm willing to concede that hundreds of thousands of people could have poured into the streets and the Supreme Court would have still handed the White House to W. The hard fact is that the Republicans had the Court and they had Congress, just as it is quite likely that Felipe Calderón will become President of Mexico.

But even if the Mexican rightist does take office, by calling his followers out into the streets, Obrador has already accomplished something essential that Gore failed to do: he has made it clear that in a completely divided country, the right cannot pursue a unilateral agenda without engendering civil unrest.

And that, by itself, is a major achievement.

...while Mercury Rising keeps the ball rolling.

Recounts can be ordered when there's specific evidence of tampering or fraud. In the 1% recount, there were a huge number of ...um...errors in Calderon's favor, so many that a reasonable person would conclude there had been fraud. Now, that fraud could have been local and not ordered by the national PAN. So, now Mexico will recount more precincts. Suppose many of those show evidence of ... um errors in Calderon's favor. A reasonable person would conclude that there might have been a national plan to commit fraud, at which moment, the law would be consistent with recounting all the ballots. This is almost identical to the situation in recent American elections, where evidence to do the recount emerges from more limited recounts. So, my reading is that Calderon is being dishonest and by issuing his own personal ruling on what the election court can legally do, he's engaging in exerting pressure on the streets as much as the marches of the PRD. As we see at MR, PANistas range far and wide on the marching orders of PAN-central.

Looks like this could take a while. Stay tuned, I guess...