Confusion reigns, allegations fly: a nation waits in limbo.

XicanoPwr has a great diary with background on the election, & more on the irregularities/fraud allegations.

Discovery of 3.5 million uncounted ballots in Mexico’s disputed presidential election cast doubt Tuesday on early projections showing conservative Felipe Calderón in the lead, raising fears of prolonged uncertainty and political unrest. (cont.)

The standoff has left Mexico the equivalent of one hanging chad away from a Latin American version of the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential contest in Florida — only with a greater potential for unrest among the country’s poor masses, who already are receptive to the idea of fraudulent elections.

Hinting at insider corruption and claiming a series of voting “irregularities,” advisers to leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador are demanding a manual recount of every vote and did not rule out street protests to ratchet up pressure on federal election authorities.   [snip]

A simple recount begins today, but a full-blown election contest could drag Mexico through weeks of uncertainty and tension.   [snip]

Luis Carlos Ugalde, head of Mexico’s Federal Election Institute, acknowledged that the ballots had not been included in Election Day reports. He stressed in an interview with Televisa that it doesn’t matter because an official winner won’t be announced until the agency concludes its nationwide recount, perhaps by Friday.He said the tally sheets representing the millions of uncounted votes were set aside on election night because of various “inconsistencies,” such as indecipherable markings on the voting booth records.   [snip]

The elections chief also warned that the preliminary tally, known by the Spanish initials PREP, shouldn’t have been taken as projecting a winner. That was a rebuke to both candidates who declared themselves victorious.It’s unclear how important the uncounted votes will turn out to be. Some might be ruled invalid. López Obrador would have to win an unusually large portion of the uncounted 3.5 million votes to reverse Calderón’s lead.   [snip]

Even if the 3.5 million votes don’t swing the election, the PRD says it has other “inconsistencies” that prove the results are flawed, including double voting in a Calderón stronghold. They also say that hundreds of vote tallies show markings in congressional races but inexplicably no preference in the presidential contest.

PRD officials are also hinting that Calderón may have a conflict of interest in the election agency itself, saying that could explain why computerized returns showed both candidates actually shedding votes in the wee hours of election night.

Namely, Camacho, the López Obrador adviser, said the campaign was looking into allegations that Calderón’s brother-in-law had been involved in the creation of vote-tallying software used by the IFE.

Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Zavala has said that he participated in a bid for election-count software but didn’t win. The weekly news magazine Proceso on June 11 reported that the top election official overseeing election-reporting software, Rodrigo Morales, is an old friend of Calderón, raising questions of conflict of interest.   link

Amy Goodman talked this morning about the election with:

David Brooks, U.S. Bureau Chief for Mexican Daily newspaper La Jornada.

Gilberto López Rivas, anthropologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. He is also a frequent contributor to La Jornada.

John Ross, a regular contributor to the Nation, Counterpunch and La Jornada. He has also written three books chronicling the Zapitista movement in Mexico. His latest is “Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicle 2000-2006” to be published by Nation Books in October 2006. His most recent article about the Mexico elections is on the Nation.com website and is titled “Disputed Election Raises Tensions in Mexico.” [see below]

George Grayson, professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He also writes a regular column for “Milenio Semanal,” a weekly magazine in Mexico. Professor Grayson’s latest book is about presidential contender, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is titled “Mesías Mexicano,” – in English, “Mexican Messiah.”   

Ross’ remarks are worth quoting at length:

I think I’d like first to say that we need to put this in context. This is the most important election that Mexico has had perhaps since the Mexican Revolution. This is an election which will tell us whether Mexico is part of North America or is, in fact, in alignment with the left democracies in Latin America that have developped. This is an election that’s been based on the class war. Lopez Obrador represents the poor people in this country. This is poor versus rich, brown versus white, worker versus boss. This is, in fact, an electoral class war, and in fact, if the election isn’t straightened out real quickly it’s not only going to be an electoral class war.

My assessment is that, in relation to what Professor Grayson said, that you can’t tell anything from what happens in the poles on election day, elections here are stolen before, during and after the election, and so now we’re in the aftermath, and we saw the disappearance of 3 million votes from the PREP, from the preliminary totals. Only 2.5 million have been put back in there. There’s still 600,000 votes out there. I personally believe that those votes were not counted on Sunday night to give the impression that Felipe Calderon had won the election. The PREP, of course, can’t determine who won the election, but if we look at the news media, particularly the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, they’re all giving it to Calderon on the basis of this PREP, from which the Federal Electoral Institute withdrew 3 million votes, in order to give the impression that Calderon had won, and I think that’s a measure of how the Federal Electoral Institute is active throughout this entire electoral process.

Way before the campaigns began in January, when Luis Carlos Ugalde was appointed president of the IFE, we began to see a pronounced bias against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and in favor of Felipe Calderon in the decisions that the IFE and Ugalde were making. This latest event where three million votes disappeared and then were placed back in after Ugalde was called on it, and he only on a television interview yesterday morning admitted that these votes had been taken out.

The other thing, Amy, that we really have to look at is that there’s an enormous disparity between the numbers of votes that have been cast for senators and deputies and those for the president. And interestingly enough, in those states in which the PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s party, has won the elections, there are much many fewer votes for the president than there are for the senators and deputies, whereas in the states that the PAN now controls, there are many more votes for the president than there are for the senators and the deputies.

And the state that’s most, I think, blaring here is the state of Tabasco. There were 13% more votes for the president than there are for senators and congressmen. And I say that Tabasco is an interesting case, because both the candidate from the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are natives of Tabasco, and of course there would be a much higher vote for president than there would be for senators or deputies. So, that’s where we are.

Today, they begin to tally up the districts. There’s going to be a huge fight about whether or not you get to open up the ballot box, open up the bags in which the ballots are counted, and recount those things. What we’re seeing here is a replay of the 1988 election, which was stolen from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by an electoral authority that was then part of the government. The IFE is supposed to be autonomous. But we’re seeing a replay right down to the fact that on Saturday night two poll-watchers [inaudible] were shot, were killed. After the 1988 election was stolen from Cardenas, hundreds and hundreds of his supporters were killed in political violence here.

In a Nation article, Ross further explains that:

Sunday’s presidential balloting was perhaps the most consequential election since the 1910 Mexican revolution. Felipe Calderón, Fox’s would-be successor, stands with the fat cats. His leftist opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, often referred to by his initials AMLO, is an unabashed champion of the poor. Calderón is a fervent believer in neo-liberal globalization and advances policies that would deepen Mexico’s political and economic servility to Washington.

Lopez Obrador is demanding renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and seeks to strengthen Mexico’s ties to Latin America where leftists in various shades now govern much of the continent–a scenario that Washington has sought to avoid at all cost. Lopez Obrador is perhaps more ideologically aligned with Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, a free-market “socialist”, than he is with Venezuelan firebrand Hugo Chávez, as Calderón and the PAN have often charged.   [snip]

The similarities to 1988 are positively eerie. On election night, tens of thousands of Lopez Obrador’s supporters gathered in the dark on the great Zocalo plaza and remembered that terrible time. “Fraude electoral!” they chanted over and over again and AMLO himself pledged that 2006 would not be a replay of 1988.

While Fox, the PAN and the business and political classes call for Mexicans to remain calm until the results are finally known, Lopez Obrador will not have an easy time containing his supporters if Calderón is declared the winner. On the morning after Sunday’s election, a US reporter out for coffee in the old quarter of this city spoke with a hotel handyman, a local street sweeper, a newspaper vender, a cab driver, and two senior citizens like himself. All of them, with more or less vehemence, considered the election to have been stolen. “They won’t get away with it this time–this isn’t 1988,” an elderly gentleman in a straw sombrero rumbled while wolfing down breakfast at the Cafe La Blanca.

Or will they? After the election was stolen from Cárdenas in 1988, hundreds of his followers were gunned down by PRI pistoleros. On election eve 2006, two PRD poll watchers were shot and killed in conflict-ridden Guerrero state in what public officials called an “attempted robbery.” That is exactly the way the killing began in 1988.

There is a very informative discussion article & discussion in Al Giordano’s U.S.-Style Post-Electoral Chaos Begins in Mexico.