MEXICO’S PRESIDENTIAL SWINDLE

When balloting stopped on the evening of July 2nd at the end of Mexico’s 2006 presidential election, the eyes of the nation turned to the two main tv networks to await the result of exit polls. Most unusually, Televisa and tv Azteca both announced they would not reveal their figures. At 11pm the chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute (ife), Luis Carlos Ugalde, appeared on screens across the country to say he would be withholding the agency’s own ‘fast result’ tally. But the ife’s ‘preliminary results’ were made available on the internet and constantly updated throughout the night. According to these data, the presidential candidate of the ruling National Action Party (pan), Felipe Calderón, initially led by five points, but with each new update the tally of votes for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (prd) rose steadily, while Calderón’s sank in equal proportion. By 1.20am, the difference was 1.4 per cent. Had those trends continued, López Obrador would have been in the lead by 4am. But the next morning, the ife announced a razor-thin lead for Calderón, ‘with 98 per cent of precincts reporting’. Here was the electoral agency’s first obvious lie: it had withheld more than 8 per cent of precincts—3.5 million votes—from its ‘98 per cent’ tally.