What Fraud?

It appears clear that even though the election was close in México, the PAN candidiate, Felipe Calderon, won. The main opposition parties, with one exception, have accepted defeat and are looking for ways to have a say in the new government that will take over in December. The exception is the PRD, whose candidate López Obrador, has declared that a massive fraud has been committed. He has called for mass meetings in an attempt to overthrow the vote, against the wishes of 60% of Mexicans (from a recent poll) who think the election was well run and clean and who do not think the July 2 vote should be thrown out. López Obrador has been very careful not to exhort his people to violence, but the threat is clearly there, even for an American whose Spanish is not perfect.

Yesterday, Calderon's car was attacked by students and other groups while he was in it. No one was hurt, but López Obrador's reaction was that if Calderon and the national election court would just recount all the votes, this sort of thing would not happen again. Calderon has no power of the vote count, and the national court is following the rules laid down in 1992 to only open ballot boxes if there is some modicum of proof that there were irregularities. This is what they are presently meeting to decide. Given this implied threat of more violence if his desires are not met, one can see why the national election court may be unlikely to break the 1992 law. Doing so would be going back to rule by strong man and away from their hard fought attempt to promote rule of law.

The following is my translation of an editorial that appeared in today's Universal that, while somewhat partisan, presents some interesting information on the vote and on what's happening down here.

What Fraud?

Ricardo Pascoe Pierce

Felipe Calderon won the presidential elections of July 2, by a narrow margin, over his closest competitor, López Orbrador. Does the narrowness of his margin of victory cancel the result? No, because that was the way the people voted. What is happening since the election is pure fantasy. Or fantasy rarified.

In Italy, the candidate of the center left, Prodi, beat the candidate of the center right, Berlusconi, by 25,000 votes. Berlusconi questioned the result, since the votes from overseas favored Prodi, while the right for Italians overseas to vote was instituted by Berlusconi himself. In México, the PAN beat the PRD by more than 240,000 votes. And the latter alleged an enormous fraud. Enormous? There were 1,241,094 party representatives, candidates, and coalitions in the little more than 131,000 precincts in the country. In other words, there was an average of nine representatives per precinct. In addition, there were 25,311 national observers registered who went from precinct to precinct (two or more precincts per observer) and 693 international visitors from 60 countries. The “observer” presence was ample and strong, as much for parties and candidates as for impartial observers.

Two point two million citizens were trained as precinct workers and, among them, more than half a million citizens received and counted the votes, before the very eyes of the party representatives and coalitions, national and foreign. En 87% of the precincts there was at least one political force represented, and in 78% there were two. There was at least one political force (the PRD, in this case) that had no representatives in nearly 40,000 precincts in all the country. Of the three principal competitive forces, it was the weakest and least organized. But somehow this allows them to have proof of an electoral fraud.

They have not demonstrated a fraud. AMLO (PRD Candidate López Obrador) said that it was computer related, and had his followers fantasizing over mathematical alogarithms put into the computers of the IFE (federal election authority) to “erase” PRD votes. Now he says no: the fraud was committed in the precincts and district counts. Camacho (PRD leader) says that the governors “ordered it.” They ordered thousands and thousands of free citizens to commit fraud? Of course not. They are lying in desperation and confusion. They have found nothing to say to justify the defeat.

Defeat. The word that destroys promising political careers. The word that has never entered the heads of AMLO, Camacho and the rest. The word that makes them tremble in fear. To not admit it and assume as democrats their true role within Mexican democracy, they have invented an allegation and denunciation without support or truth. They are men who lack courage to confront their grave errors committed during the entire campaign, and they refuse to admit their fallibility.

An example: the error of the internal and external alliances (All the three major parties had formed alliances with other minor parties for this election). From the “happy” distribution of seats supposedly guaranteed to garner votes, the PRD probably will be left with fewer seats than in the outgoing legislature. This result is unacceptable for this party. Rosario Robles (?) gave more seats to the PRD than to AMLO. Why? Because after subtracting the seats for Convergence and the PT (Partido Trabajador) (which were some of the coalition of parties that Obrador headed up), of the remainder, half are independents or PRIista (members of the old Partido Revolucionario Institucional that ruled México for 70 years until 2000) renegades who do no belong to any particular party, and do not have any loyalty to the PRD, especially now that AMLO has lost the election. Of the 123 seats that remain, half will go free.

The PRD is not a considerable legislative force, if these factors are taken into consideration. The PRI will fill the space of the responsible opposition that looks for ways for the country to function and advance. The PRI will come to an understanding with Calderon (PAN candidate and winner of the July 2 vote), as will Convergence, Alternative, and other parties, to give substance to institutional agreements. And the PRD? After the TEPJF (special election court instituted in the 1990s to avoid election fraud and instill trust in the electoral system) ratifies the victory of Calderon, by a narrow margin, AMLO will declare himself the true popular president and, following Juaréz’s (president in the 1850s and 1860s) example, will ride around the country in his carriage looking for ways to destabilize México, as he himself has said, “politically, socially, economically, and financially.”

There was no fraud in the past election, mainly because the people would not have permitted it. This discussion is a trick of men incapable of confronting their errors. Men full of fear of paying the consequences for failed calculations and who look, even under rocks, for those responsible for their debacle.