Drama in Mexican presidential election continues

There continues to be no clearcut winner in the Mexican presidential elections with all reports well within the margin of error:

A leftist anti-poverty campaigner took a slim lead over his conservative rival in a dramatic recount of Mexico’s presidential election vote on Wednesday and warned the country’s stability was at stake.

In scenes reminiscent of the Florida recount in the U.S. presidential vote in 2000, the divided nation bit its nails as partial returns showed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador overtaking Felipe Calderon, who finished a fraction ahead in the initial count.

Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, was ahead of pro-U.S. lawyer Calderon by about 2.2 percentage points in the recount of 75 percent of polling stations but it was still too early to declare a victor from Sunday’s vote.

Protests broke out in the capital earlier on Wednesday to press home claims that the leftist was the victim of fraud in the preliminary count.

Lopez Obrador warned electoral authorities to be thorough in the recount, expected to last about a day.

“The stability of the country is at stake,” he said.

The Harvard-educated Calderon would be an ally of the United States in Latin America, where left-wing leaders critical of Washington have taken power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela in recent years.

Lopez Obrador, a former Indian welfare officer, has promised to renegotiate a North American trade pact to block cheap U.S. corn and beans entering Mexico as of 2008.

So far it’s very encouraging that Mexico’s institutions are holding out so well. See for example this comment from a post at Fruits & Votes:

One thing that should not be overlooked as the two contending candidates both claim victory based on polls within the margin of error is that the formal institutions charged with monitoring the election as well as the informal media institutions we expect to monitor politics have performed fairly well thus far. No media outlet here in Mexico City that I am aware of released exit polls that showed the race was too close to call; most simply anounced that their polls were not definative and did not present any of the results. Similarly, the IFE made the absolute right call in not calling the race-multiple analysis of the quick count data all showed it was inconclusive even though these quickcount results seem to parallel those from the PREP(there is an interesting report at the IFE website with the quickcount results). Then the IFE has stuck to its guns on following the established procedures and laws for counting the votes and for any recounts that are necessary while keeping the public well informed. In general, the IFe and Media have acted just as we would want them to when a race is too close to call-cautiously. To illustrate the importance of this, imagine what could have been avoided with this type of activity in evaluating the close results in Florida in 2000. So, as one newspaper here declared on Monday, the victor thus far in the election has been democracy; now hopefully the candidates and their followers can act in a way consistent with that goal.

But we really are all on tenterhooks on this as this post from Mark in Mexico suggests:

When you are watching the television news reports from Mexico City, be careful with what you see and are told. If the PRD decides to whip up its supporters and take to the streets, Mexico City is where they will strike first. That’s because Mexico City and the surrounding state of Mexico are a PRD strongholds. AMLO won the vote in Mexico City by some 1.5 million votes and in Mexico State by another 500,000. So it will be easy for the PRD to make it appear that the whole country is in an uproar when that is far from the case.

Most of the country is quiet and will accept the decision of the IFE and would prefer that this be decided quickly and not drag on through the courts ala Bush/Gore 2000. Even here in Oaxaca, the striking teachers have announced that they will abandon the city center after more than two months of occupation and return to their classrooms next Monday to finish the 2005-2006 academic year.

Over the last several days I’ve read a number of comments contrasting the potential for fraud in the Mexican system with our own. I think it’s extremely difficult to do this intelligently: our system is incredibly complex with, actually, 50 different approaches to accomplishing the same task and overwhelmingly likely to stay that way.

Based on my experience here in Chicago there are, essentially, three different kinds of vote fraud: retail, wholesale, and official.

Retail vote fraud is fraudulent voting by voters themselves and, at least here in Chicago, it’s fairly difficult. With voters required to vote in specific precincts, signature checks, and (at least in theory) two parties represented among the election judges (those who actually run the election and tabulate the votes at the polling place level), there are substantial checks in place to prevent that kind of vote fraud.

What I’m referring to as wholesale vote fraud is fraud at the polling place level perpetrated by the election judges and it would actually be fairly easy and nearly undetectable here. For practical purposes it’s a one-party system here and in actuality many of the “Republican” judges of election are only Republicans on election day. To get enough election judges that each precinct would have one or more Republican judges of election would require that nearly every Republican in the city of Chicago serve as an election judge.

So, in practice, I can think of a half dozen ways that judges of election could perpetrate wholesale election fraud. Our precinct in the absence of major equipment failure completes the process of tabulating the votes within two hours of the polls closing. Whenever I hear of late-reporting precincts i.e. five, six, or more hours late, I always assume either equipment failure or whole election fraud.

Official election fraud would be fraud by the Board of Elections itself and, although they’re the custodians of the results, I think that under the system here it would be quite difficult except in the case of a recount.

As I understand the Mexican system retail election fraud is actually quite easy, wholesale election fraud is probably more difficult than here, and official election fraud probably equally difficult if not more so, again except in the case of a recount.

So is their system better than ours? Beats me. I’m pretty sure that if such a system were adopted here in Chicago, we’d have retail election fraud at an incredible level.