Fraud in the Land of Telenovelas

Since it appears that a majority of our readers come for news about a certain telenovela, I felt it would be appropriate to write something about the Mexican “election”. I kept myself quite busy this weekend and didn’t spend much time at the computer, so I'm just now getting time to write about this. Anyway...via Google News, I found a nice series of articles from the Narco News Bulletin.

First this:

One of the major problems for IFE and the Fox administration is that if they were to allow the bread-and-butter recount that the public demands, the ugly truth would come out that an unknown number of ballot boxes have “disappeared” in the past two days. The ballots from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl – a López Obrador stronghold – were discovered yesterday in the municipal garbage dump. The results from two of those precincts have been missing, since Sunday, from IFE’s vote tallies. An IFE official, ambushed by television reporters, exacerbated the crime yesterday when she blamed the Mexican military: the Armed Forces, not IFE, are supposedly guarding the ballots, she said, in defense of her bureaucracy. This, sources close to the military told Narco News, produced significant anger among the military generals and troops who – if the public does not believe or accept IFE’s final decision – will be called upon to quell the national rebellion that follows.

...

The malicious behavior by the Federal Electoral Institute and its chairman Luis Carlos Ugalde – in their visible maneuvers partial to Fox’s PAN and Calderón throughout the election season and since – was evident prior to the election, but on Sunday night became clear as never before to the Mexican public. On Monday, the bias of the “umpire” became clearer as hundreds of specific examples of fraudulent vote counts began to surface across the Internet. On Tuesday, more so, when Ugalde and IFE were caught red-handed in a big lie: their knowingly false claim that the preliminary results system had tabulated “98.5 percent” of the vote when, in fact, the IFE had hidden 3.3 million (more than seven percent) of the precinct tallies from public view.

Then this:

Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) when it withheld 3.3 million votes (about eight percent of the total) from public view while claiming that its Preliminary Elections Results Program (PREP) had tabulated 98.5 percent of the vote.

Our report then showed that the inclusion of 2.5 million of those votes – when, under significant public pressure, IFE finally disclosed them – significantly reduced the agency’s original claim that Calderón had won by 377,000 votes: that total fell to a 257,000 vote margin in one swoop. Wednesday’s first official count reduced that margin by another 13,000 votes, even as the IFE refused to conduct hand-counts of more than 99 percent of the ballots.

An electoral arbiter acting in bad faith, with an interest in preventing an accurate tally, would, in response to such hemorrhaging (the daily freefall, since Monday, of Calderón’s alleged margin of victory), act hastily in a manner that would prevent transparent completion of a careful count.

On Thursday, in such haste, IFE chairman Luis Carlos Ugalde inexplicably usurped the legal role reserved for the judicial electoral tribunal (known as the Trife), by rushing to declare Calderón the official victor.

As Mexico’s leading newsweekly, Proceso, concluded from its own investigations:

“The decision by the IFE to leave the announcement of its PREP results in suspense, in spite of the fact it could have done so before midnight on Sunday, confirms that this agency has been an ally of the federal government in its goal of avoiding, at all costs, the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency.”

Then this:

The process enabling Mexicans to exercise their right to vote from abroad (approved in February 2005), asserts Felipe Aguirre, was “rigged” from the start by PAN militants that used associations of Mexicans in California to manipulate the vote in favor of their candidate.

Just as they did in Mexico, in Southern California, the PANistas used the state databases of civil organizations, clubs and federations – here, with the complicity and coordination of the Mexican consulate – to identify citizens’ voting preferences.

Armed with this information, PANistas easily obstructed the registration of those not in organizations that openly sympathized with their party.

These accusations point to former Secretary of Social Development Josefina Vásquez Mota, who left her post early this year to join Calderón’s campaign team. Under her watch, with help from the consulate, the personal information of every organization of Mexicans living in the United States was used to determine the amount of federal monies destined to development projects in the home communities of these U.S.-based immigrants; even though many of these projects were half-funded by the financial resources of the migrants themselves. This relation was exploited by making resources conditional on the support of the PAN and its candidate.

Aguirre, who is also Maywood, California’s vice mayor, adds that before the presidential elections, private associations were created to serve the PAN, such as the Council of Mexican Federations (COFEM), which received a $4 million grant from the Ford Foundation to strengthen the organizations and federations of Mexicans in the U.S. that have existed for many years and traditionally sympathize with the PRD.

...

Many observers have compared the post-electoral conflict in Mexico 2006 to that of 2000 in the United States. While there are indeed parallels (as well as distinctions) to be drawn, there is a very important difference in the equation, and it is societal: That part of the electorate in the United States that was robbed did not see any way to fight and overturn the fraud, or simply was too gullible or afraid to do so. In Mexico, however, the path exists, a critical mass of the Mexican populace understands exactly what was done to them and is ready to assume the ultimate risks to overturn the crime. At stake for global capital and its increasingly simulated “election” processes not just in Mexico but throughout the planet is the manufactured belief that nothing can be done. As occurred a century ago, with the Mexican revolution of 1910, Mexico is on the verge of, as Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos has often said, “amazing the world again.”

And here’s the latest from the Miami Herald:

Mexico's young democracy entered uncharted territory Sunday as the Party of the Democratic Revolution put the finishing touches on what officials said would be 152 lawsuits aimed at overturning results of the July 2 presidential election.

Top leaders of Mexico's left-leaning party, known by its Spanish initials PRD, are challenging the count in all 300 of Mexico's electoral districts. Sunday was the opening shot fired in what is sure to be a nasty legal battle to challenge conservative Felipe Calderón's narrow 0.58 percentage point victory.

...

It will be up to the Federal Electoral Tribunal, known by its Spanish acronym TRIFE, to determine whether there were irregularities that warrant opening up and recounting the more than 41 million ballots cast.

Horacio Duarte, who is one of the architects of the PRD's electoral challenge, told McClatchy News Service on Sunday that his party would present 152 lawsuits. Those suits will document roughly 50,000 inconsistencies between the computerized vote count on July 2 and the official recount that ended in the wee hours of Thursday, when Calderón declared victory around 4 a.m.

Specifically, Duarte alleged that on election night there were ''predesigned results.'' He alleged vote-counting software was vulnerable and that the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, which polls show is held in high esteem by most Mexicans, allowed someone to manipulate results to show Calderón continually in the lead. During the official recount days later, López Obrador led almost continually until the overnight hours, when Calderón passed him by fewer than 300,000 votes.

“The electoral authority allowed the management of databases,” Duarte alleged. “It's a real problem, concrete and documented.”

...

Complaints about voting irregularities or fraud normally are filed with one of the five regional tribunals, which makes the ruling. But disputes involving the presidential race are forwarded to the seven-judge highest tribunal.

Political parties may challenge election results under various grounds, including the actions of local election officials. A nonconformity lawsuit seeks to have the entire election thrown out.

One key issue may be whether López Obrador can visually inspect all so-called null votes, ballots that were judged for various reasons to be invalid. There were 908,931 null votes, nearly four times as many as Calderón's margin of victory.

So here's my definition of democracy: all men are created equal, and everybody's vote gets counted. The end. I will never understand why someone wouldn’t want to err on the side of counting all the ballots (other than “because my guy won, and I don’t wanna”, of course). If there’s any question at all—as long as it’s remotely legitimate, as this appears to be—recount the ballots. Period. It can’t cost very much. When Florida went schizo in 2000, I said we should recount the ballots. When the Washington governor race was challenged in 2004 (in favor of a Democrat this time), I said we should recount the ballots. When the Mexican election is decided by a sliver of a fraction, and there are ballots found in trash sacks by a dumpster and film of a guy stuffing a ballot, um, urn, you recount the freaking ballots.

(And why is it that Mexico can manage to get every voter the same type of ballot, but the US can’t?)

Anyway, like Avedon I'm a little bit pissy that somebody writing for the 2nd-most important paper in the United States can't avoid taking a "they're sore losers...despite the thousands of irregularities and video evidence...can't they understand it's about winning, not getting it right?" tone, but then again, that's why berlin niebuhr told me to stop reading the WaPo four years ago. Hopefully the good guys will win, but corrupt individuals will do absolutely anything in their power to win because they know when they lose once, it gets about 4000% easier to lose again.

CorrenteWire's been all over this, along with Narco News above, Avedon, and Mercury Rising. Well done, guys.