Long History of Vote Fraud Lingers in the Mexican Psyche
Supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City’s main square. A sign condemns the departing president. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: September 7, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 6 — Felipe Calderón was named the next president of Mexico on Tuesday by a tribunal that confirmed that the vote was basically free and fair. Yet a significant slice of the voting public still believes that the election was marred by fraud and that the country’s electoral institutions are corrupt.
Mr. López Obrador signing a document in Zócalo Plaza, where backers rally daily.
To some extent that is because his leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has waged a fiery campaign to persuade his supporters that his narrow loss on July 2 was part of a broad conspiracy between President Vicente Fox and business leaders to deny him victory.
But why do between a quarter and a third of voters, according to recent opinion polls, agree with him?
One reason is history. After decades of one-party rule sustained by fraudulent elections, many Mexicans still deeply distrust their institutions and courts. But it is also because Mexicans have a very different notion of electoral fraud than voters in the United States, a notion that goes beyond stuffing ballot boxes.
That is not to say that there was no hint of conventional fraud.
Mr. López Obrador pointed out that more than half of the tally sheets from the nation’s 130,000 election precincts contained errors in arithmetic, a sign of widespread incompetence among poll workers or of extra ballots magically appearing in some boxes and disappearing from others.
The seven-member electoral tribunal rejected that argument, chalking up the irregularities to human error, which they said had affected all parties, and so could not be fraud. They also denied the left’s request for a full recount based on the errors.
But the Mexican conception of fraud is strikingly expansive, compared with United States traditions, and by those lights the cries of fraud become more plausible.
For instance, most of Mr. López Obrador’s supporters complain bitterly about the “intervention” of President Fox in the election. They talk about “a state election” and the “imposition” of the candidate from Mr. Fox’s conservative party, Felipe Calderón, whom the electoral tribunal finally proclaimed president-elect on Tuesday.
There is no doubt that Mr. Fox used his position as president and his official tours to campaign vigorously against Mr. López Obrador. Though he never mentioned the leftist candidate by name, he used code words for him, railing against populism, demagogy and false messiahs.
The president also warned against “changing riders” in midstream and said that government handouts to the poor, a centerpiece of the leftist’s campaign, would bankrupt future Mexicans. Meanwhile, the Fox administration spent extravagantly on public service messages praising the government’s achievements.
Such use of the bully pulpit may seem tame in the United States, but in Mexico it is against the law for a president or any elected official to use public resources to campaign for his party’s candidate. The law is rooted in history. For seven decades before Mr. Fox’s election in 2000, Mexico was ruled by one party, with the sitting president choosing his successor and spreading government largesse to make sure he was elected.
The election law does not explicitly forbid a president to express support for a candidate, but the magistrates said in their ruling on Tuesday that Mr. Fox had come dangerously close to putting the election’s validity in doubt.
Worse in many leftist’s minds were the actions of various business leaders. Toward the end of the campaign, the largest business association, as well as some big companies, spent more than $19 million on advertisements aimed at undermining Mr. López Obrador, who promised to raise taxes on the rich and on business.
The advertisements never mentioned candidates by name. But some of them said, for instance, that Mexico did not need a dictator like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to whom Mr. López Obrador is often compared by his enemies. Others noted that Mexico’s economy had been stable for 10 years and said that “betting on change” could bring back the days of economic crisis.
The judges called the ads “black propaganda.”
United States voters are used to these “soft money” campaigns and take them in stride. But here, once again, such spending is illegal under the election law and is plausibly considered to be fraud by many of Mr. López Obrador’s supporters. The magistrates agreed, saying the business leaders had broken the law. But they said the impact was too slight to warrant annulling the election.
Beyond those big arguments are a host of smaller ones that have sewn doubt among the faithful in the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution.
The magistrates’ decision not to see the errors on tally sheets as evidence of fraud has fed suspicions that the court cannot be trusted, a theory that Mr. López Obrador reiterates in every speech and which is fortified by the country’s long history of corrupt judges, though no proof has been presented.
Mr. López Obrador’s followers also have no confidence in the Federal Electoral Institute, which organized the election. In October 2003, when congressional leaders were making deals to appoint new members to the institute’s governing board, Mr. López Obrador’s party was shut out. Since then the leftists have regarded just about every decision the electoral institute makes with suspicion.
In the end, the court ruling may have put Mr. Calderón in the president’s office, but it has not dispelled feelings among Mr. López Obrador’s supporters that they were robbed. “What more proof do you need?” said one López Obrador supporter, Enrique Ramírez, after the ruling. “At his rallies, Andrés Manuel has given us the proof of fraud, and we believe him, or at least I do.”
Mr. López Obrador is now calling for a “national convention” this month to mount a civil disobedience campaign to “re-found the republic” and reform “institutions that don’t deserve any respect.”
How far the movement can go and whether it can remain peaceful remains to be seen and may depend on how deep the suspicions of fraud, as seen in Mexico, run.
What is sure is that Mr. López Obrador has defined himself for many voters as the candidate who lost the election, not through his own errors but because the entire apparatus of the state was against him. That is an old tune in Mexico, one that many know the words to.
