Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ahead of Mexico vote, fear of fraud is fraught
MEXICO CITY — The specter of possible fraud rears its head in Mexico each electoral campaign, both in the popular imagination and among candidates on the ballot.
This year has been no exception.
With leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador holding a wide lead in most polls, his allies are warning even before Sunday’s presidential vote that there better not be any funny business.
“They shouldn’t dare commit a fraud, because if they do they will meet the devil,” Yeidckol Polevnsky, president of the candidate’s Morena party, said last week. “We will not accept it.”
This is Lopez Obrador’s third try for the nation’s top office, and he alleged fraud twice before after losses in 2006 and 2012.
After his first race, which was decided by just 0.56 percent and went to conservative Felipe Calderon, Lopez Obrador’s supporters mounted a protest camp that snarled traffic and hurt businesses for months along a 3-mile stretch of road in the heart of the capital.
This time some supporters again fear that dirty tricks could be employed to keep him from office, even as authorities and outside observers say the possibility is remote.
“The chances of not winning exist because of the system that has been in place for years,” said Antonio Lopez, a street vendor in Mexico City and Lopez Obrador supporter.
Such fears have a basis in history. For most of the 20th century, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dominated virtually all aspects of politics and held the presidency uninterruptedly for seven decades until 2000, and then regained it in 2012.
Dead people voting, votebuying, theft or burning of ballots, threats of violence, rigged counting, particularly in remote areas — it’s all been seen.
In 1998 opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had a narrow lead in early returns when the system for tabulating votes was said to have “collapsed,” purportedly because of failure of phone lines that were used to report the count.
After it came back online, the election went to ruling party candidate Carlos Salinas.
For many, the moment exemplified the lengths to which the PRI would go to keep power.
Since that time Mexico’s voting technology has improved, an electoral body independent of the executive branch has been created, and results are no longer delivered by phone.
Even though Morena was founded just four years ago, today it has a nationwide reach that will allow it to have observers at nearly all election centers to watch for any shenanigans.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been reports of suspicious activity.
In recent weeks, officials confirmed armed assaults to steal ballots in three southern states, while a coalition of nongovernmental groups monitoring the campaign said vote-buying schemes and threats to cut off social programs have targeted entire communities. The groups said all the political parties have been guilty, but that most of the activity was on behalf of the PRI.
Police last week in Mexico City seized the equivalent of about $1 million in pesos from two men who were allegedly delivering the cash to PRI headquarters and were unable to explain its origin.