Mexican candidate files challenge in presidential vote

The legal challenge follows Saturday’s huge demonstration in Mexico City’s central square, the Zocalo. Half a million people assembled to protest the designation of Felipe Calderón of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) as the winner of the presidential election. Last week the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) tallied the results from all of Mexico’s electoral districts and declared Calderón the victor over López Obrador by a margin of less than 244,000 votes. The winning margin represents 0.58 percent of the 41.7 million votes cast in the election.

In its 836-page filing with the Federal Judicial Electoral Tribunal, the López Obrador campaign documented widespread irregularities in the vote count. In particular, it noted that the Federal Electoral Institute, which runs the elections, recounted ballots at only 2,600 of the 130,000 polling stations, limiting recounts to those stations with irregular tally sheets. This recount of only 2 percent of the ballots slashed Calderón’s purported lead from 400,000 to 244,000 votes. López Obrador has demanded a full recount of all the ballots, which he claims will give him the victory.

Evidence of fraud

Other irregularities documented by the López Obrador campaign or reported in the media include:

* Two-and-a-half-million ballots from over 11,000 ballot boxes were not included in the preliminary results released on July 3 because of irregularities such as blank spaces in the tally sheets, unclear penmanship and arithmetic errors.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/mexi-j11.shtml