As many of you know, Mexico’s recent Presidential election has been called into question by the left leaning (and officially losing) candidate, López Obrador, who has rallied thousands of his supporters to take to the streets in Mexico City:
López Obrador ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers Saturday morning, alleging for the first time that Mexico’s electoral commission had rigged its computers before the July 2 election to ensure the half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, a champion of free trade. In a news conference before the rally, López Obrador called Calderón “an employee” of Mexico’s powerful upper classes and said a victory by his conservative opponent would be “morally impossible.”
López Obrador added a new layer of complexity to the crisis by saying he not only would challenge the results in the country’s special elections court but also would attempt to have the election declared illegal by Mexico’s Supreme Court. That strategy presages a constitutional confrontation because according to many legal experts the special elections court is the only body that can hear election challenges. […]
López Obrador’s approach pairs legal maneuvers with mass public pressure. On Saturday, he gave a mega-display of street power, drawing an estimated 280,000 people into the city center on a humid, drizzly afternoon, according to a Mexico City government estimate.
While many foreign observers have been quick to claim the there were no significant electoral irregularities in the process that formally awarded a half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, the candidate of President Fox’s right wing National Action Party, Greg Palast is not among them. The first journalist to expose the massive voter suppression tactics that Jeb Bush employed in Florida in 2000 to ensure his brother’s ascension to the White House, has an article in the Guardian (UK) in which he suggests that ChoicePoint, the same company the Jeb Bush employed to purge Florida’s voting rolls of African Americans, may have operated in Mexico to scrub the voting rolls of leftist voters:
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There’s something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico’s first “clean” election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist. […]
Jeb’s winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business – in Mexico – at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked “secret”, regarding a contract for “intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations”. […]
As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left’s turf, complaining that their names were “disappeared” from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can’t know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?
Needless to say, this was also a problem in the 2004 US election. In Cleveland on election day, Election Protection received numerous complaints from voters in minority precincts that their names had been mysteriously dropped from the voting rolls. Similar complaints were received state wide in Ohio that year, always from majority Democratic districts. Clearly the purging of voter rolls in the 2000 and 2004 US elections, and now in the 2006 Mexico election suggests a pattern at work. In each case, the more conservative, right wing candidate wins a narrow victory. In each case, it is the poorest citizens, those most likely to vote for left leaning candidates, whose names have been “disappeared” from the official voting lists.
However, these were not the only similarities between the recent elections in the US and the Presidential election in Mexico. Palast has much more regarding “irregularities” in the recent Obrador/Calderón presidential election. See if this elicits that deja vu moment all over again in you:
There’s more that the Mexico vote has in common with Florida besides the heat. The ruling party’s hand-picked electoral commission counted a mere 402,000 votes more for their candidate, Felipe Calderón, over challenger Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That’s noteworthy in light of the surprise showing of candidate Señor Blank-o (the 827,000 ballots supposedly left “blank”).
We’ve seen Mr Blank-o do well before – in Florida in 2000 when Florida’s secretary of state (who was also co-chair of the Bush campaign) announced that 179,000 ballots showed no vote for the president. The machines couldn’t read these ballots with “hanging chads” and other technical problems. Humans can read these ballots with ease, but the hand-count was blocked by Bush’s conflicted official.
And so it is in Mexico. The Calderón “victory” is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador’s call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks.
Blank ballots are rarely random. In Florida in 2000, 88% of the supposedly blank ballots came from African-American voting districts – that is, they were cast by Democratic voters. In Mexico, the supposed empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest.
There’s an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It’s called “negative drop-off”. In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice?
Let’s see if we can tally up all the similarities. Close election in which thousands of votes are lost or uncounted. Check. Purged voter lists. Check. Thousands of ballots in which no one supposedly cast a vote for the single most important electoral office, the Presidency. Check. All the “irregularities” with the vote favor one candidate over the other. Check. The people who declare the winner controlled by the party whose candidate wins the election. Check.
This bears watching and further investigation, in my mind. I find it exceedingly odd that conservative politicians across North America keep winning close elections, elections that are always claimed to be honest and above board, but which, in fact, have numerous problems, problems that most of the major media outlets in the United States have not bothered to report. One encouraging sign are the massive street protests by Obrador’s followers, protests that are reminiscent of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine where a fraudulent vote count was ultimately thrown out, and a new election held, after the people took to the street. One can only hope that the Mexican people will have a full and fair recount of the election, so that they can be assured that their President truly was elected by the will of the people.
Final thought. Our midterm elections are fast approaching. Does anyone really expect that things will go any better this time around than they have in the last three elections? That Republican officials won’t attempt to suppress votes in traditionally Democratic districts by any means necessary. If you do, my friend, you are living in a fool’s paradise.
