Mexico update9: Calderón set to win official count by a hair; López Obrador demands recount

Posted by Joshua Holland at 8:00 AM on July 6, 2006.

I'll update this as developments warrant and bump it to the top.

I crashed at around 4 am with López Obrador clinging to a quarter-point lead. That turned around while I snoozed and Calderón's lead -- 0.45% -- just exceeded the 0.44% of ballots that remain to be counted. He'll win the official count.

Now the action begins.

López Obrador will demand a ballot-by-ballot recount. Mexico's election authority, the IFE, says the tally was perfect, and that there's no need. Calderón, who's claimed victory since Sunday, will paint López Obrador as a hothead who's unwilling to accept the will of the people.

But López Obrador has consistently said that he'll honor the results of a fair count, even if he were to lose by a single vote.

Most observers say the process has generally been clean, and the authorities have worked hard to maintain people's confidence. But there have also been persistent reports of irregularities, some quite serious.

Ted Lewis, head of the Global Exchange observer mission, told El Universal that his team witnessed vote buying first-hand in the states of Oaxaca and San Luis Potosí. Earlier this week El Universal reported the discovery of ten ballot boxes from a poor Mexico City neighborhood in a dumpster.

These kinds of scattered reports would not be significant if either candidate had scored a 5-point win, but with the margin of victory looking like it'll be around a half-point, all of the issues raised will be viewed as proof-positive that the fix was in. It looks like Mexico is headed for a drawn-out fight over the presidency.

The most troubling report I've seen so far is this:

But more alarming than the vote-buying, Lewis said, were discrepancies in the vote count found by statistical specialists working for Global Exchange and its Mexican partner Alianza Cívica (Civic Alliance), which also observed the polling process.

"We´re not at the point where we´re ready to say electoral fraud but we´re really quite disturbed," Lewis said. "We didn´t expect to see this level of irregularity."

He said the groups´ experts had found that the number of votes for Congress in various instances exceeded the number of votes for the presidency in states where López Obrador reportedly won, while the opposite was true in states where Calderón was the victor.

López Obrador has called for protests this Saturday, as he was expected to do in this circumstance.

I'll have more later (I've got to run). Also, more on the way about Greg Palast's … "reporting."

The Institute for Policies Studies' Chuck Collins, who observed the elections with Global Exchange, has been an invaluable resource for me, and I'd like to give him a big shout out. I owe him a beer in a big way.

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La Jornada and La Reforma are both still updating their totals. As of 12:45 pm am EST, Lopez Obrador clings to a lead of 0.85 precent, with a bit more than 93% percent of the count completed. I'm going to try to take a cat-nap, which means at least a 50% chance I'll crash for the night. Night owls stay tuned to those sites.

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At 10:12 PM Eastern time, the IFE suspended the count announcements of vote totals that were released every ten minutes during the day. Luis Carlos Ugalde, the head of the institute, said the count will continue all night if need be, and the final results will be released as soon as possible. Just under 90% of the official tally is completed and Lopez Obrador holds onto a 1.25% lead. I've made inquiries into what's happening and will update if needed. The announcement, in Spanish, is in the comments.

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At 10:03 PM Eastern time, La Jornada reported Lopez Obrador ahead by 1.65 percent with just over 86% of the official count complete.

AMLO's lead has been deteriorating slowly but steadily all night. The tension is killing me!

***

At 8:16 PM Eastern time, La Jornada reported Lopez Obrador ahead by 2.04 percent with a hair less than 80% of the official count complete. Oh, man, this is getting interesting. La Jornada's site is swamped and just crashed under the weight of all the traffic, but I'll be sitting here hitting "refresh" until I get the final tally.

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La Journada is now reporting Lopez Obrador ahead by 2.55 percent with 62 percent of the count completed. See below for context.

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Over on the front page, Chuck Collins has it exactly right: the corporate media is creating it's own narrative. I have seen twenty papers referring to the official count, now underway, as a "recount." That's not accurate; this is the first official count and everything up to now has been based on the preliminary count.

Bloomberg is reporting that with a little more than half the count finished, Lopez Obrador leads Calderon by 2.7 percent (37.1 to 34.4%).

If that were to stand, it would be the first time anywhere in Latin America that the official count reversed the preliminary tally. The biggest difference between the preliminary count and the official tally that's ever been recorded was 0.4 percent.

It also wouldn't be the end; the candidates would simply switch places with Lopez Obrador the presumptive winner and Calderon demanding a recount.

And this is really important: it's an interesting story but it's meaningless because we don't know which districts have been counted so far. Think about it in American terms; if the first half of your count had lots of "blue" states and few "red" states, it would look like a Dem victory, but could very well turn around in the second half. If districts that leaned heavily to Lopez Obrador have been disproportionately represented and Calderon districts are still to come, we could very well see the official tally match the preliminary count (I know this is a bit confusing).

Meanwhile the markets are tanking on the news. Check Bloomberg:

Mexican stocks, bonds and currency tumbled on concern that Lopez Obrador, who vowed in his campaign to boost social spending to aid the poor, will hold on to this lead in the recount, snatching victory away from Calderon.

Aside from the fact that it's not a friggin' recount, think about what they're saying. As the guys at the Center for Economic Policy and Research point out (PDF), Mexico's enjoyed total growth of 17% over the past 25 years -- 0.68% per year. Lopez Obrador's policies couldn't possibly do worse.

The markets are Craaazy.

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As I noted below, Lopez Obrador's most serious claim so far is that there are 3 million votes that weren't counted in the preliminary tally. Luis Carlos Ugalde, head of the IFE, said there were 2.58 million "damaged" votes, and promised they'd be included in the official count. There are reports that their addition narrows Calderon's presumptive lead -- also based on the preliminary count -- from around one percent to 0.64 percent, but I can't figure out the methodology used for that projection, so take it with a grain of salt.

El Universal reported that 10 ballot boxes and a polling station report were found in a garbage dump in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City.

Reuters reports that "activists demonstrated outside offices of the government's prosecutor for electoral crimes, shouting against fraud and hanging a huge banner which said: 'Ugalde: You deserve jail.'"

The Washington Post reports, ominously and with its usual lack of context, that Emilio Serrano, a legislator from the PRD, said in an interview that violence is possible if the vote-tampering allegations are proved.

"We are not afraid to die in the fight," Serrano said. "We in the public are tired of the lies and the abuses, which have been demonstrated over the length of our history." The missing context is that Lopez Obrador has pledged unequivocally to respect the results of a fair count. Watch for the media frame that Calderon clearly won and the "leftist firebrand" has no reason to question the results, in keeping with the 'Latin American leftists versus democracy' meme that's so popular today.

That said, things are continuing to heat up. IPS' Chuck Collins, who'll be updating his own reporting soon, tells me that the teachers' strike in Oaxaca that I mentioned last week -- now a broader social movement -- is becoming quite dramatic.

Oaxaca, a PRI stronghold, went PRD on Sunday, confirming for many that the current governor, Ulises Ruiz, won his last race by fraudulent means. That further delegitimizes Ruiz, whose resignation the teachers, joined by indigenous rights groups and others, are demanding.

Collins says "the governor is holed up in a hotel conference room with his top staffers in the affluent suburb of San Felipe de Agua where he lives. He was photographed voting on Sunday, but has otherwise been conspicuously absent the last month.

"Today, there are blockades of major streets and stores --with the teachers/popular coalition using buses to block."

The "Popular Assembly" -- the broad coalition that has been organizing the mega-marches -- has set up a parallel government and has occupied Oaxaca's former State House -- which has been a museum in recent years -- on the Zocalo today.

"They will declare themselves 'in charge' of the state," Collins says. They're calling for a statewide general strike this Friday.

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In Mexico, each precinct does its own count, which is attached to the sealed ballot box and sent to the Federal Election Institute (IFE) [Correction: only the summaries are sent to IFE; the ballot boxes remain sealed in the districts]. All of the preliminary tallies are based on the precincts' counts. The official count will begin tomorrow, and is expected to last for up to a week.

It looks likely that there will be challenges. Manuel Camacho Solís, a top adviser to López Obrador, said Monday that "Our perception is that there have been very important irregularities."

Both candidates continue to claim victory -- the Mexican press has repeatedly said that the situation represents a "worst case scenario."

A preliminary, uncertified count showed PAN candidate Felipe Calderon with a 400,000-vote lead. Lopez Obrador's camp is charging that there was "vote-shaving" at some voting stations, especially in his home state of Tabasco. Lopez Obrador alleges that as many as three million votes are missing, citing a discrepancy between estimated projected turnout and preliminary counts. He stopped short of calling the elections fraudulent, but is already calling for a ballot-by-ballot recount. He hasn't yet asked his supporters to take it to the streets, as many expect him to do if Calderon ends up with a narrow lead.

The Washington Post reports that both parties are lawyering up, and all of the papers are talking about a legal process reminiscent of that which followed the 2000 Florida impasse. In Mexico, however, there's more breathing room -- the president doesn't take office for five months -- so there won't be pressure to cut the process short. The vote is almost certain to end up in the Federal Judicial Electoral Tribunal, a court that has the ultimate say on the winner. The whole thing could drag on for months; election authorities aren't required to certify the vote until September 6.

The process will put Mexico's electoral institutions, which have undergone dramatic reforms during the past ten years, to the test. Will they be transparent enough to deal with a nail-biter? Polls show that the IFE is one of the country's most trusted institutions, but that may not hold up if things get ugly and a lot of charges are flying around. Some PRD officials are accusing the IFE of "bias."

Whatever the final outcome, it's likely that the close vote and a sharply divided legislature will make it difficult for the eventual winner to govern. One analyst called it a "recipe for gridlock."

The head of the EU observer mission said yesterday that the results of Mexican elections were "so far reliable" and they ruled out widespread fraud in the elections, although they noted scattered irregularities.

The elections were monitored by thousands of foreign observers, and most of the monitoring organizations have yet to submit reports on their findings. When they do, we'll have a clearer picture of what transpired, from an on-the-ground perspective.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.