A Full Recount Would Show that López Obrador Won Mexico’s Presidency by Mo

[Laotra]

http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1967.html

A Full Recount Would Show that López Obrador Won Mexico’s Presidency by More than One Million Votes
The Tip of the Iceberg of the Crimes Committed by Mexican Electoral Authorities Is the Fraudulent Vote Count of 2006


By Al Giordano
Part II of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin
July 8, 2006

Commercial Media organizations are reporting that Felipe Calderòn won Sunday’s presidential election by 0.58 percent of the vote and will govern Mexico for the next six years, beginning on December 1.

It would not be the first time that the Commercial Media has been wrong.

Many of those reports have claimed that Wednesday’s first official count of precinct results in Mexico – 130,000 pieces of paper that claim to represent the vote tallies – was a “recount.”

It would not be the first time that lazy “pack journalism” got a major international story wrong.

The truth: No recount occurred on Wednesday, or before, or since. What occurred – we repeat – was only the first official count of precinct tallies.

A Narco News investigation has found that in the small sample of precincts – less than one percent – where a recount was allowed, the shift in numbers away from Calderón was so drastic that, if recounts of all the ballots followed the same trend, the official results would invert and Andrés Manuel López Obrador would become the clear winner of the presidency by more than one million votes:


The Million-Vote Fraud

Part I of this series documented the election night dishonesty by Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) when it withheld 3.3 million votes (about eight percent of the total) from public view while claiming that its Preliminary Elections Results Program (PREP) had tabulated 98.5 percent of the vote.

Our report then showed that the inclusion of 2.5 million of those votes – when, under significant public pressure, IFE finally disclosed them – significantly reduced the agency’s original claim that Calderón had won by 377,000 votes: that total fell to a 257,000 vote margin in one swoop. Wednesday’s first official count reduced that margin by another 13,000 votes, even as the IFE refused to conduct hand-counts of more than 99 percent of the ballots.

An electoral arbiter acting in bad faith, with an interest in preventing an accurate tally, would, in response to such hemorrhaging (the daily freefall, since Monday, of Calderón’s alleged margin of victory), act hastily in a manner that would prevent transparent completion of a careful count.

On Thursday, in such haste, IFE chairman Luis Carlos Ugalde inexplicably usurped the legal role reserved for the judicial electoral tribunal (known as the Trife), by rushing to declare Calderón the official victor.

As Mexico’s leading newsweekly, Proceso, concluded from its own investigations:


“The decision by the IFE to leave the announcement of its PREP results in suspense, in spite of the fact it could have done so before midnight on Sunday, confirms that this agency has been an ally of the federal government in its goal of avoiding, at all costs, the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency.”

For authentic journalists, Mexico’s post-electoral conflict is one of those gigantic news stories that happens few times in the course of a lifetime: Not merely a story about how a state-of-the-art electoral fraud was perpetrated in a major country of 100 million people, but, more historically, the story of how that fraud will be laid to waste.

This news story will unfold for weeks, probably for months, before it is resolved. The first battle is already underway: the struggle to count the votes.

It is objectively false to report, as major news organizations have done, that there was a “recount” of votes on Wednesday. There was no such thing. What occurred was the first actual counting of reported precinct results, something that occurs days after every election, and the results demonstrate the overwhelming evidence that a full recount is necessary in order to achieve an accurate result.

On Wednesday, there was partial recount of less than one percent of the ballots: a partial recount that lowered Calderón’s supposed margin of victory by more than six percentage points, or more than 13,000 votes. In the context of the fraudulent results discovered in this sample of recounted ballots, it can therefore be projected that a recount of just 18.7 percent of the ballots would tie the race. A full recount – if the votes in the ballot boxes have not been tampered with or disappeared (as has already occurred in various parts of the Republic when marked ballots have been discovered in municipal dumps and garbage cans on the streets) – will show a victory by candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador by more than one million votes: 1,056, 900, more closely estimated.

López Obrador’s campaign is, in fact, seeking a recount of only those precincts where it found indications of fraud: a lot of them: 43,000, more or less. This extrapolation – if those precincts are counted vote-by-vote – would give his candidacy a victory of 243,000 votes.

Is it any wonder, then, that Calderón, his National Action Party, and Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials), oppose and resist a full or partial recount even at the cost of their own legitimacy? (In spite of their legaloide claims that “the law” doesn’t allow a full recount, Articles 41 and 99 of the Mexican Constitution – we will translate the relevant constitutional passages in this report – do not just allow a full recount: they require it.)

The true and legal victor in last Sunday’s elections, former Mexico City Governor López Obrador, will make his case today, Saturday, to his supporters and to the nation of how exactly this election fraud was carried out against him and them. He will have to do so against the gale-force winds of a boycott of the true facts by much of the mass media (especially the Mexican television duopoly of Televisa and TV Azteca), and the complicity of the country’s electoral authorities in the maintenance of their own false decrees. He will begin this daunting task today, Saturday, at 5 p.m. Central Time, directly to a multitude of his supporters that he has called to the Mexico City Zócalo – the Mexican town square in front of the National Palace – at an event which he has titled an “informational assembly.”

Despite the newsworthiness of the moment, even its value as a “ratings booster,” this opening statement by the prosecution will not likely be televised. Still, the facts will travel to every corner of the country and world by word-of-mouth, organization, and, significantly, via the Internet, which has an important role to play in this chapter of history.

Many observers have compared the post-electoral conflict in Mexico 2006 to that of 2000 in the United States. While there are indeed parallels (as well as distinctions) to be drawn, there is a very important difference in the equation, and it is societal: That part of the electorate in the United States that was robbed did not see any way to fight and overturn the fraud, or simply was too gullible or afraid to do so. In Mexico, however, the path exists, a critical mass of the Mexican populace understands exactly what was done to them and is ready to assume the ultimate risks to overturn the crime. At stake for global capital and its increasingly simulated “election” processes not just in Mexico but throughout the planet is the manufactured belief that nothing can be done. As occurred a century ago, with the Mexican revolution of 1910, Mexico is on the verge of, as Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos has often said, “amazing the world again.”


Guanajuato as Florida

The north-central Mexican state of Guanajuato – home turf of President Vicente Fox and an importantísimo electoral base for his and Calderón’s PAN party – is where official results from the state’s 6,122 precincts (less than five percent of the national vote) gave Calderón a margin of more than 700,000 votes. That is to say, even according the highly suspicious official results, López Obrador won the rest of the country by almost half a million votes. This was a state where electoral fraud was carried out – and continues to be covered up – on a systematic basis.

There, in Guanajuato, the official results from 640 of those 6,122 precincts show discrepancies and irregularities which include more votes cast than are voters in the precinct, more votes cast for Calderón than votes cast in the precinct, electoral officials that refused to count the votes in public, discrepancies between the actual result and the reported result, missing or suspect vote tally reports, each of them sufficient to trigger, under law, a vote-by-vote recount in the first instance; on Wednesday, despite motions to count the votes in each of those 640 precincts, Guanajuato election officials allowed only eight to be recounted.

Those eight precincts – representing 0.13 percent of the state’s vote – reduced Calderón’s margin by 253 votes, or an average of 31 votes per precinct. If the remaining 632 precincts with irregularities were to show a similar shift, López Obrador’s count would increase by 19,592 votes. If all 6,122 precincts, counted by hand, were to show a similar shift, Guanajuato alone would change the national tally by 189,782 votes. From five percent of the Republic, Calderón’s official margin of victory would, according to our math, be reduced nationwide by 77 percent, from 244,000 to just 55,000 votes. That is just one state with just five percent of the nation’s population.

Claims by IFE and others that the selection of civilian precinct authorities (something akin to jury duty) makes bias and fraud impossible are absurd. Corruption, in Mexican elections, is a two-way street with a long history. For every bribe or “dispensa” (food, construction materials, etcetera) handed out by a corrupt official to rent a vote or a voter ID card, there is a voter willing to do his part trade his vote (or his credential) for money or material things. The same goes for overzealous citizen poll staffers: A culture of corruption is not cured in a single election or in a six-year presidential term. It can only be countered by legal recourses such as the one that exists, or should: a vote-by-vote recount.

The perpetrators of this fraud, the PAN party, complained for decades about the very heavy-handed tactics used by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to rob elections from the PAN. But once in power, the PAN adopted those same anti-democratic tactics for its own use. In a place like Guanajuato, where the culture itself is heavily PANista, more than ten percent of the precincts fell victim to such obvious fraudulent activity that poll-watchers from other parties challenged the irregularities on election night and again on Wednesday during the official count. In others, in this heavily PAN-dominated state, there simply were no opposition observers in the room on Sunday to make the challenge (the same occurred in other highly populated PAN-governed states like Jalisco and Nuevo Leon). The bias of the jurors (and, during Wednesday’s official count, by IFE employees) was made evident by the refusal to open the ballot boxes and count, vote-by-vote, even in 632 precincts where clear and challenged irregularities had occurred with sufficient evidence to force a hand count.

This kind of stonewalling by the PAN, in its electoral strongholds (not just in Guanajuato but also in Jalisco (and its capital of Guadalajara), Querétaro and throughout Northern Mexico, (including Nuevo Leon and its capital Monterrey), and the IFE all over the country indicates that the participants in this fraud are well aware that their victory is one of theft and criminality. Every step since Sunday they have sought to prevent a full recount under the eyes of the press and public. Human nature is human nature: people’s bias and partiality plays a role in the vote counting, too, wherever it can. None of this analysis requires a conspiracy theory (not to say there hasn’t been a conspiracy, either; in Mexican politics, it would be strange if there was not): It is sufficient to trust in human nature and its untrustworthy elements, not to mention human error.

And this is precisely why a full recount is necessary. Those who oppose it or prevent it from happening reveal exactly why it must happen to clear up the significant public distrust of these results. If the pro-Calderón forces (including IFE) oppose that sunlight, that opposition strongly suggests that that they have reasons to prefer the darkness. Their refusal to permit it, if their opposition to a vote-by-vote recount prevails in these opening stages of the post-electoral conflict, assures that Calderón, if he makes it to inauguration on December 1, will face an impossible task of trying to govern an angry and organized population that does not consider him to have won legitimately. That the PAN is willing to risk even that is the best indication that it knows it “won” illegitimately, only through fraud.

As for Guanajuato – Mexico’s “Florida” in this year’s electoral fraud – Fox and the PAN party did not invent the anti-democratic tactics that they have embraced there and elsewhere in 2006. They learned how to cheat from the PRI, when it governed that state, and where the PRI used the same techniques against Vicente Fox when he ran for governor in 1991.

Vicente Fox, in his own autobiography (pulled off the shelves today by El Universal columnist Katia D Artigues), wrote of how he confronted the 1991 election fraud against him as candidate for governor of “Mexico’s Florida,” Guanajuato:


“After a 250-day campaign, the official results gave the victory to (PRI candidate) Ramón Aguirre with 53% of the vote. The PAN and I were in second place with 35% of the votes. The signs that a monumental electoral fraud had been perpetrated in Guanajuato were so evident that I immediately called for civil resistance. On August 21 in Irapuato, before 4,000 PAN sympathizers, I denounced the existence of more than 700 precinct results filled with immoralities. I detailed that in 506 of the 3,000 precinct results scrutinized there were more votes cast than voters…

“We began a march of 60 kilometers to the city of Guanajuato which we called the ‘walk for democracy’ to demand that the state electoral tribunal annul the results of at least 700 precincts. As part of these civil resistance actions, we blockaded highways, took over the international airport, surrounded the city of Guanajuato, took over city squares in Celaya, Irapuato and Dolores, filling them with citizens, housewives, students and elders, who denounced the electoral fraud. Our spirit was too overwhelming and to stop us, a horde of drunken PRI party members tried to destroy the state congressional building…”


Fox’s 1991 civil resistance led to a compromise in which then-independent (now PAN member) Carlos Medina Plascencia was installed as interim governor. (And that little piece of history explains why, as Narco News reported on June 30, Fox has positioned PRD founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas to become interim president if his party’s 2006 electoral fraud comes similarly crashing down as occurred to the PRI in Guanajuato in 1991.)

Revealingly, at the same present moment in 2006 when the PAN is attacking López Obrador’s announcement that he will file a legal complaint with the Trife electoral tribunal, the PAN itself is doing the same to challenge the local results for three seats on the Mexico City Council. What they say is that López Obrador should not appeal the results or spark civil resistance. But what they – the PAN - themselves have done is exactly what he – Obrador and the PRD - and his supporters are likely to do this summer and fall.


Vote Shaving, “Ant Style”

With a 244,000 “official” margin in the nation’s 130,000 precincts, the IFE-claimed margin comes down to less than two votes per precinct: less than two per ballot box, as many precincts contain more than one. An electoral fraud can be carried out simply by “shaving” or adding a few votes here and there: this pattern is already documented to have helped Calderón on the IFE PREP totals, and that IFE’s own website furnished the visible proof may explain why IFE – for all its claims of transparency – has not put the Wednesday “official count” results up by precinct online. Even as IFE has declared Calderón the winner, it has refused to account, precinct by precinct, where it got its current set of numbers.

Take a look at this photo of the “acta” (the signed precinct result) in Tabasco precinct number 0245, ballot box #2, and compare it with the result that IFE reported on its PREP system: The acta says that López Obrador received 236 votes: IFE’s PREP results, though, showed him with 203; a reduction of 33 votes from a single ballot box.

Photo of PREP result from Tabasco (click to enlarge):




Photo of the “acta” from the same precinct:




Or, here, in the State of Mexico, in precinct 1019: The photo of the acta gives 188 votes for Obrador, but only 88 – a difference of 100 – were reported by IFE:

Photo of PREP result from the State of Mexico (click to enlarge):




Photo of the “acta” from the same precinct:





In other districts, there was a pattern of one vote shaved from López Obrador between the acta and the PREP results, or one vote added to Calderón. Narco News has reviewed similar photos of that phenomenon from Baja California precinct 0105 (62 votes for Obrador, 61 reported), and from Baja California precinct 0548 (190 votes for Calderon, 191 reported).

Here are some others; this report only cites those that we have been able to review via photographs of the original actas: Veracruz precinct 2073: 188 votes for Obrador, 186 reported, two votes disappeared. Morelos precinct 0061: 194 votes for Obrador, 190 reported, four votes disappeared. Mexico City precinct 2411: 139 votes for Obrador, 134 reported, five votes disappeared. Querétaro precinct 0375, ballot box #1: 103 votes for Obrador, 102 reported, one vote disappeared. State of Mexico precinct 0855: 208 votes for Obrador, 197 reported, 11 votes disappeared. State of Mexico precinct 0297: 167 votes for Obrador, 159 reported, eight votes disappeared. Mexico City precinct 0444, ballot box #2: 322 votes for Obrador, 318 reported, four votes disappeared..

We have not seen a single photograph of the opposite occurring: of votes taken from Calderón or added to Obrador.

This election fraud tactic is known in Mexico as “estilo hormiga,” or “ant style.” In an election this officially close, there is no question that, if undetected, small shovelfuls of votes diverted or hidden can make the difference in the national result.

That IFE chairman Ugalde rushed to pronounce a winner on Thursday before his agency publicly disclosed the precinct-by-precinct tally counts is cause for concern: No citizen, candidate or party is able to confirm that the actual results from the hard count match the IFE final tally. In the context of this pattern of “ant style” differences with the PREP results on Sunday, and IFE’s dishonesty (see Part I of this series) in hiding 3.3 million votes from the PREP results while claiming 98.5 percent had been counted in them, Ugalde’s panicked rush to declare a winner without providing transparency in the result seems all too much like a repeat of his suspicious Sunday performance.


Do the Ballots Still Exist?

Earlier this week, Narco News shared reports and a photo of ballot boxes and ballots from the Obrador stronghold of Nezahuacoyotl, discovered in a municipal garbage dump. Similar sightings (photographed and notarized) have been unearthed in Veracruz and Mexico City (also bases of Obrador’s support). Here is a photograph from today’s La Jornada of three completed ballots found adrift all alone in a Mexico City garbage can: two of those votes are for Obrador, the third is for PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo.


Lost ballots found in the garbage.
Foto: D.R. 2006 La Jornada

What might explain IFE chairman Ugalde’s rush to pronounce judgment and opposition to a vote-by-vote recount is the possibility that these are not isolated cases; that if a full recount is ordered, but the ballots no longer exist in safe keeping, all the IFE and mass media claims of a “clean” electoral process will find themselves in the garbage dump of history. More personally, IFE officials could go to jail. Again, the only way to find out would be to conduct a full vote-by-vote recount of the kind that IFE and the PAN so vehemently oppose.

Wednesday’s hard count of precinct results was bizarre to behold. Your correspondent published, via the Narcosphere, the hour-by-hour results reported by IFE.

Interestingly, from the noon hour Wednesday when we first began tracking and logging the results, when 25 percent of the precinct counts had been reported, and hours later, when 65 percent had been tabulated, López Obrador consistently polled ahead of Calderón by 2.42 to 2.76 percent of the vote (a percentage consistent with our projection that López Obrador won by about one million votes); both candidates had almost no fluctuation to their totals. The manner in which that tally suddenly changed course is bizarre from a mathematical or statistical perspective.

As the latter third of the results came in beginning at 4:44 p.m. on Wednesday, Calderón’s vote percentage began to creep upward as López Obrador’s creeped downward by equal and opposite amounts. During this count of the final 35 percent of the tallies, interestingly, PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo’s percentage remained steadily the same as it had all day (within half-a-percentage point, landing at 22.26 percent) as did that of the also-rans Patricia Mercado and Roberto Campa. All day and night – see the accompanying graph – three candidates remained with their totals in a straight line, but in the final stretch only Obrador and Calderón percentages diverged from the consistency of the first two-thirds of the tallies.



Calderón partisans (including IFE and the mass media) explain the final shift as one of northern Mexican regions coming in last. But Madrazo’s vote, in particular, was uneven nationwide. This was shown by IFE’s PREP results in the breakdown among the five regions by which the vote count was organized.

Madrazo’s regional totals were 24.09 percent in Region 1 (Northern Mexico) and 23.12 percent in region 2 (North-Central Mexico), the regions from where Calderón supposedly got his late surge in Wednesday’s precinct count: nearly one and two points above his national average of 22.26. Had the final tallies in Wednesday’s precinct count really come in from the North and North-Central regions, a statistically significant upward shift would have been registered from Madrazo as well. That it did not casts important doubt upon the claims by IFE and television media that a regional vote saved the day for Calderón at the eleventh hour.

Again, these are from the already discredited PREP results, but it is significant how divergent Madrazo’s tally is region by region, and particularly how he finished higher in the two northern regions than in the combined three central-southern regions. And yet the sudden divergence early Thursday morning between Calderón and Obrador – according to IFE’s still undocumented conclusions – did not statistically change Madrazo’s total as it would have had it mainly come from Calderón’s northern base regions.

Suspicions about computer-generated fraud – rooted, in part, in the fact that IFE’s computer systems were partly designed by companies and partners of Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala – have been raised anew by the statistical anomalies and inconsistencies both in the PREP counts and hard counts claimed by the IFE, particularly the lack of fluctuation in Madrazo’s hard count tally at the very moments when a radical shift occurred from Obrador to Calderón. And the fact that IFE chairman Ugalde rushed, at 4 p.m. Thursday, to declare a winner without having transparently reported the region-by-region and state-by-state results (at press time, IFE still has not published them) smells as rotten as the legal fact that Ugalde is not empowered by any law to declare a winner but that he inexplicably did so anyway: that task belongs, legally, to the judicial branch of government, the Trife tribunal. Ugalde’s illegal hurry suggests motive to literally play fast and loose with the facts, as he has done.

As Article 99 of the Mexican Constitution, establishing the Electoral Tribunal (Trife) and its Supreme Court, clearly states: “The (Trife) Supreme Court will conduct the final count of the election of President of the Mexican United States.”

So why did Ugalde, arrogantly and illegally, steal that role for himself? What was his hurry? What was his fear of waiting, as the law provides, for the Trife to declare the winner?

The Constitution has some other interesting things to say that are relevant to this post-electoral conflict…


The Constitution Requires a Full Recount

Article 41 of the Mexican Constitution states:


“The people exercises its sovereignty through the Powers of the Union, in cases of their responsibility, and through those of the States, regarding their internal regimens, in the respective terms established by the present Federal Constitution and those of the States, which in no case may contradict the stipulations of the Federal Pact…

“III. The organization of federal elections is a responsibility of the State that is conducted by a public, autonomous agency named the Federal Electoral Institute, provided with legal power and its own resources, in whose formation the Legislative Branch, the national political parties and the citizens participate under the terms provided by law. In the exercise of this governmental function, certainty, legality, independence, impartiality, and objectivity are the guiding principles…”


This article requires, among other things, that the government provide “certainty” as to election results (as well as “legality” and “impartiality”). The mere existence of widespread public uncertainty (as well as illegal and biased activity by the IFE) provides the supreme electoral Tribunal with absolute legal grounds to reassert conditions that would restore public certainty. The Trife therefore has the power, and responsibility, to require a recount as the obvious and only means to restore that certainty.

And if a conflict surfaces between the IFE and the Trife as to interpreting those factors, Article 99 of the Mexican Constitution is very clear:


“The Electoral Tribunal will be, with the exception of the requirements of Article 105 of this Constitution (author’s note: which says that the national Supreme Court may only resolve, in the electoral arena, Constitutional conflicts between individual states, or between states and the federal government), the maximum jurisdictional authority in the material and specialized organ of the Judicial Branch of the Federation…

“The Electoral is responsible for resolving, definitively and finally, according to this Constitution and under law questions regarding…

“II. The legal challenges that are presented about the election of President of the United Mexican States that will be resolved once and for all by the (Trife’s) Supreme Court…”


This article clearly states that, in case of conflict between IFE’s interpretation and that of the Electoral Tribunal, the Tribunal has final power and say. Thus, the Constitution – see Article 41, especially the part about the requirement for “certainty” – must be interpreted as determinative over any IFE regulation.

That’s the law. It allows for, and requires, public “certainty” in presidential election results: something that does not exist today regarding Sunday’s vote. A recount is the only path available with which to establish that certainty in the 2006 election results.

But that presumes that the hype is true: that Mexico counts with honest institutions transparently upholding the rule of law.

Your reporter witnessed, in 1999, that same Supreme Electoral Tribunal – the Trife – fail to comply with its mandate at an hour when the voters of Guerrero were denied certainty of a gubernatorial election plagued with evidence of fraud. At that moment, the Trife ignored the public uncertainty, and allowed the PRI candidate to triumph in a situation very similar to today’s, in which the Guerrero state IFE granted, by a dubious one percent of the vote plagued with similar irregularities, against a candidate of the PRD for governor.

That was then. This is now. If the Trife decides to repeat its dark history, this year on the national level, what argument shall be left that the Mexican people can or should have faith in their institutions? The Trife will decide one matter – whether there shall be an authentic recount of the votes – but, in doing so, it will also determine the legitimacy of the Mexican Federal State. If it opts again to ratify illegitimacy, by denying a recount, nobody should claim surprise if the people respond accordingly, and take that power away from the corrupted institutions of the Mexican State.

To be continued…

--------------

(Mods, Narconews gives blanket permission for non-commercial sites to republish their stories)

EU "observers" kiss my ass!

[pooja]

1. I said before the election that Bush wanted

Calderon to win... so it would happen no matter what.

[Syrinx]

2. I'm not sure, but you may've gone over four paragraphs

;)

[Judi Lynn]

3. Apparently you've never noticed articles posted here from this source.

As the poster wrote:

Narconews gives blanket permission for non-commercial sites to republish their stories.

[Syrinx]

6. apparently you didn't notice the "wink"

;)

[0007]

24. Touche....

[Ghost Dog]

7. Uh, as long as DU is still considered non-commercial -

(Google ads?)

see here: http://www.narconews.com/docs/disclosures.html

"In the case of truly non-commercial publications, such as IndyMedia, we grant a blanket permission to republish our work, and simply request that due credit be given to the author and to Narco News, with a link provided."

[Laotra]

10. I believe the matter re google ads is scholastic ;)

Most importantly, Narconews wants the story out and to reach as many as possible to counter the simulation by CCM. I know many people, understandably, don't usually click on the link but read the four paraghaphs, and therefore I wanted to make the whole story more accessible, as it deserves, so that everybody wins. :)

[robinlynne]

27. and thank you for that!

[w4rma]

22. This source doesnt mind if you reprint the whole thing in any way you want

with the exception of selling republished articles by this source for a profit.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Laotra, thanks for posting this information. We need all we can get.

We've heard Calderon's brother in law is dirty, but that was long before THIS happened! From the article:

Suspicions about computer-generated fraud – rooted, in part, in the fact that IFE’s computer systems were partly designed by companies and partners of Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala – have been raised anew by the statistical anomalies and inconsistencies both in the PREP counts and hard counts claimed by the IFE, particularly the lack of fluctuation in Madrazo’s hard count tally at the very moments when a radical shift occurred from Obrador to Calderón. And the fact that IFE chairman Ugalde rushed, at 4 p.m. Thursday, to declare a winner without having transparently reported the region-by-region and state-by-state results (at press time, IFE still has not published them) smells as rotten as the legal fact that Ugalde is not empowered by any law to declare a winner but that he inexplicably did so anyway: that task belongs, legally, to the judicial branch of government, the Trife tribunal. Ugalde’s illegal hurry suggests motive to literally play fast and loose with the facts, as he has done.

As Article 99 of the Mexican Constitution, establishing the Electoral Tribunal (Trife) and its Supreme Court, clearly states: “The (Trife) Supreme Court will conduct the final count of the election of President of the Mexican United States.”

So why did Ugalde, arrogantly and illegally, steal that role for himself? What was his hurry? What was his fear of waiting, as the law provides, for the Trife to declare the winner?
(snip)

This kind of nonsense surely, surely sounds so familiar.

[Ghost Dog]

5. Yes, this is full story I'm picking up from Mexican sources in Spanish

(when I've time). Glad to see the work's being done to cast it into English.

[Laotra]

8. Yup

Narconews ("somewhere in América") is now adherent to the Other Campaign and most of its authentic journalists are currently working in Mexico and many of them had been travelling with Delegate Zero until Atenco happened and the tour was put to halt until the political prisoners from Atenco were free, others are following rebel in Oaxaca. It is multilingual: Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, French, as much as the journalists and voluntary translators get done.

If you know who Abbie Hoffman was, you know where Al Giordano, the founder of Narconews, is coming from. Check it out, they need our support.

[Ghost Dog]

15. Ah ha, sí, sí, old enough to remember

(though european here).

Those who want to look 'furthur' on the Mexican left could well also start with:
Indymedia Tijuana BC: http://imctj.espora.org/news/2006/07/1463.php , http://imctj.espora.org/news/2006/07/1462.php
Indymedia Mexico: http://mexico.indymedia.org/

and then look deeper, into the even more indigenous south:
Indymedia Chiapas: http://chiapas.indymedia.org/
http://qollasuyu.indymedia.org/

...

[cal04]

9. here's a few more

especially this one. I read it the night we were watching the so called re-count

What Mexico will wake up to...
by Al Giordano on Thu Jul 6th, 2006 at 01:55:08 AM EST
Two days ago the IFE claimed that candidate Felipe Calderon enjoyed a 1.4 percent lead in the presidential race, with 98.5 percent of the vote, it said, counted. At all times in the IFE preliminary counting process Calderon was in the lead.

Yesterday, they found 2.5 million votes and Calderon's lead shrunk to .6 percent.

Today, during the hard count of precinct results, and the opening of a very small percentage of ballot boxes, more than 94 percent of those hard counts have been tabulated and while Lopez Obrador has been in the lead all day, the last five percent of votes counted will no doubt push IFE's favored candidate Calderon into the plus column when around 97 or 98 percent of the vote is counted.

I estimate - based on IFE's behavior and statistical manipulations on Sunday and Monday - that this "recount that is not a recount" will claim Calderon the victor by .2 or .3 points (80,000 to 120,000 votes, or less than one per each of the 130,000 precincts).

That would still represent a halving of the margin the IFE claimed Calderon had yesterday.

At this rate, the Hidebrando Overlords at IFE will HAVE to rush to judgment and declare Calderon the "winner" late tonight or in the dawn hours because, since each day more votes are found for Obrador, they can't let this drag on even one more day.

So, in the morning, we will likely awaken to "news" that IFE declares Calderon the "winner."

At that point it goes to the high Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE), the judicial arm of the elections system, a body that never met a fraud it didn't like. The plea filed to those judges will be that ALL the ballots be recounted. But there is little hope in the courts to overturn a fraud. It has never happened on a national race.

And everyone knows that justice won't be found from a fraudulent system. But there is another path, below a.nd to the left, toward justice, and the story will take a very dramatic turn very shortly.

I'm not going to wait up all night and pretend there is any chance that legitimacy will prevail. I'll rest up for the battle ahead. See y'all tomorrow.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2006/7/5/171915/9815#3

Collusion In Mexico?
http://agonist.org/sean_paul_kelley/20060706/collusion_in_mexico

[fasttense]

11. God love you for posting this Laotra

I've been looking everywhere for news of the Mexican election. Thanks for keeping the truth out there.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

12. Funny.

We have not seen a single photograph of the opposite occurring: of votes taken from Calderón or added to Obrador.

[AzDar]

13. Deja vu all over again, no? When the Mexicans fight like hell to

right this wrong, we'd better be taking notes for November!

[Adelante]

14. Is this right?

"López Obrador’s campaign is, in fact, seeking a recount of only those precincts where it found indications of fraud: a lot of them: 43,000, more or less. This extrapolation – if those precincts are counted vote-by-vote – would give his candidacy a victory of 243,000 votes."

I thought he wanted a full recount. I think every vote should be recounted.

[Ghost Dog]

16. I'm gathering that the 'formal legal process' for complaints

requires reference to specific precincts, and there's a time limit tomorrow, Monday.

So I reckon the strategy right now is to document and demand hand recounts at the worst, most obvious places through this legal process (working hard on it at all hours right now); while at the same time asserting the moral right and the political expediency (for all concerned) of a full recount (or even annulling and re-running the entire election).

[Adelante]

18. I see

Thank you :hi:

[robinlynne]

28. we learned that one in florida.....

[Vidar]

17. Thanks so much for posting this, Laotra.

[slackmaster]

19. There is only one way to settle this election once and for all

Count the votes.

[Judi Lynn]

21. Worse things could happen than to count those damned votes!

They could do it as a courtesy to the VOTERS, if they aren't too busy.

For WHOM do these politicians imagine they are "working?"

This may screw up their plans, of course, letting the ELECTED man become the President.

[Bob3]

20. and the Election of 2000 proves to be the gift that keeps on giving

If you can't trust the votes - well what's the whole point eh? It's *'s legacy one of many that will take years to repair.

Any exit Poll info by the way? I can't imagine there were any shy * voters in this one but you never know.

[LostinVA]

23. Exit polls gave the win to Obrador n/t

[Bob3]

36. Well that seems par for the course - do you have link?

I'd like to see the numbers. esp the difference between the exit poll and the announced count.

[dipsydoodle]

25. Sorry I've lost the plot here

Are they still going to have a full recount ?

[Laotra]

32. That's what they fight for

a full recount, ballot by ballot. Not sure they - or we - will get it.

[drm604]

26. This sounds awfully familiar...

Somebody translated the playbook into Spanish. Isn't that a no no? Somebody ought to tell the freepers about this. English only!

[Ghost Dog]

29. As regards the EU Observers claiming the election was straight:

I'm coming to the conclusion that, based on the EU Observation Mission's (EU EOM's) own "Observation Methodology":

EU key objectives

To conduct a comprehensive analysis of the electoral process and to offer an impartial and informed assessment of the elections and strengthen the confidence of voters to participate freely.

An observation mission assesses all aspects of the electoral process, including the delimitation of constituencies; the registration of voters and candidates; the training of election staff; voter education; media coverage, the campaign and the preparations for Election Day, as well as the appeals process. It also makes an assessment of the constitutional and electoral framework. On Election Day, observers visit polling stations in order to observe the opening, voting, the counting and the aggregation of results.

Regular meetings are held with election officials at national, regional and local levels, political parties, candidates, civil society and media throughout the country. Observers clearly distinguish between complaints, rumours, accusations and verified facts. Only facts that are witnessed or verified by the observers will be used as the basis of the mission's report. Furthermore, although the mission co-operates with other (observer) organisations, only information collected by its own international observers will be used for the mission's statement and final report.

...

A few days after the election, the Chief Observer of the EU EOM issues a public preliminary statement based on long-term and short-term observations of the entire process. Approximately one month after the final results, a comprehensive report is issued, which will include a series of recommendations for improvements to the overall electoral process and democratic environment.

The seven criteria

The European Union adopted in 2000 the following election assessment criteria:

The degree of impartiality shown by the Election Administration.
The degree of freedom of political parties and candidates to assemble and express their views.
The fairness of access to state resources made available for the election.
The degree of access for political parties and candidates to the media, in particular the state media.
The universal franchise afforded to voters.
Any other issue which concerns the democratic nature of the election (e.g campaign violence, rule of law, legislative framework.)
The conduct of polling and counting of votes.

The EU Mission's "Chief Observer" had no right to publish his "Preliminary Declaration" on July 3rd, only hours after the first provisional (computerised - PREP) count was produced and promoted by the Federal Electoral Institute and even before this had been corrected on July 5th (with the 'result' released on the 6th) - and long before the election process proper was/is over and the result finally ratified by the Electoral Tribunal.

It is on the basis of this EU Mission Chief Observer's Preliminary Declaration that international media has been saying that the EU Observers saw no irregularities. In fact, in this aspect, the EU Chief Observer's role on July 3rd appears to have been highly irregular (and biased) in itself, by intervening with a statement at a too-early stage, before the full count was either over or duly ratified.

[Nothing Without Hope]

30. K & R. Also see the PALAST ARTICLES on the stolen Mexican election & MORE:

Published in the Guardian in the UK.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=437351
thread title (6-30-06): STEALING MEXICO - by Greg Palast

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1556158
thread title (7-3-06): Dispatch from Mexico City: Stealing it in Front of Your Eyes - Greg Palast

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x439021
thread title (7-8-06): Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat-Greg Palast/The Guardian

And then there were the ballots found in the dump:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2373785
thread title (7-6-06): Election ballots found in trash dump in Veracruz

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1577254
thread title (7-6-06): Mexico: Presidential Election Ballots Found in Dump

Oh yeah, this one was stolen and the footprints of the criminals who did it are there to find. Let's see if Mexico can show the US how to preserve democracy in the face of such an attack - a point made very well in this editorial by E J Dionne:

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21057
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Washington Post Writers Group
07.07.06

Mexico's test: Election 'crisis' is a chance to show its democracy superior to others

WASHINGTON -- Mexico is in a mess because voters in its presidential election were so closely divided between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the center-left, and Felipe Calderon, the center-right candidate who was declared the narrow winner Thursday.
As a result, there are charges of theft and miscounts, of "grave inconsistencies." Lopez Obrador has insisted that the authorities "help clear up any doubts," and "not allow the will of the citizens to be violated."

Let's be clear: There's nothing wrong with Mexico's voters. Close elections happen. The test of a democracy is how a bitter dispute of this sort is resolved. Can it be settled in a way that enhances confidence in the electoral process and the legitimacy of the ultimate winner?

Mexicans have one thing going for them: There is no question under Mexican law that the winner of the popular vote will be the winner of the election.

(snip - read on for a devastating analysis of the failure of US democracy in the election process and how Mexico has a chance to show us how it should be done.)

[Laotra]

34. Every vote matters

I just wish that Palast was better journalist. Sure, he's in different league compared to CCM simulators, but we need to raise the standards even higher.

[happydreams]

31. Where has Karl Rove been lately?

Sure would like to know what role he played in this.

[Laotra]

35. Names

Dick Morris and Rob Allyn.

http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1817.html

[Joanne98]

33. Another Narco News article. Mexico’s “Democracy” Spurns Millions

Mexico’s “Democracy” Spurns Millions of Immigrants that Sustain Its Economy
http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1965.html

The “Trickery” of the PAN Takes Aim Against Foreign Votes Not in its Favor


By Margarita Salazar
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign on the Other Side
July 9, 2006

Los Angeles, California.- Even though Mexican immigrants sent $20 billion in remittances back home in 2005, as many as 10 million potential voters were sidelined from Mexico’s electoral “democracy” by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) during the country’s 2006 presidential race. The party of the presumed winner, the National Action Party (PAN), once again showed its scorn for the downtrodden, denying them their right to vote through sly trickery.

As those remittances poured in last year, Mexican legislators reformed the Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures (COFIPE) to allow more than four million interested Mexicans to vote in the presidential elections. However, a previous estimate by the IFE put the number of eligible voters in the United States at 10 million.

Nonetheless, a few months before the July 2 elections, immigrants discovered these measures were no more than a blatant ruse, denying them access to voting booths that could have easily been installed in consulates and embassies to facilitate the process.

Instead, in April, authorities mailed electoral packages to more than 40,000 registered Mexicans so that they could vote via express mail. These packages only went out to those who dished out the $9 registration fee needed to be inscribed on the electoral list.

Morevover, in order to vote, every Mexican in the United States must have a current voter’s credential, which is not renewable from abroad. The IFE never established the necessary electoral infrastructure outside of Mexico, nor was it possible for citizens abroad to learn about the proposals of each candidate.

This last complaint is being publicized by a growing chorus of several Mexican community leaders in Los Angeles.

Such a claim would be noteworthy if those 10 million Mexican migrant workers actually saw a true option in the proposals put forth by the different candidates. But the hard reality is that these Mexicans, who risked their lives to emigrate to this country, left their own country because its political system – to which the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) also belongs – has only offered them unemployment, low wages and the repression of those social sectors opposed to such policies.

With the closing of the polls and the irregularities that are coming to light, the debate over the elections has begun to polarize those that sympathize with electoral “democracy” and those who, based on their analysis of the reigning political system, believe that the electoral system only benefits the privileged classes.

The complexity of the issue leads to different interpretations, which at the same time indicate different scenarios, depending on who is providing the analysis.


A Crumbling Electoral Democracy

According to the IFE, 32,632 Mexicans voted in the United States, of which 58.29 percent voted for Felipe Calderón of the PAN, 34 percent for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD and four percent for PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo. Community leaders had a mouthful to say about these results, detailing the way the IFE hatched the “fraud” on the other side of the border.

Felipe Aguirre, national advisor for the PRD in the United States, explained that those numbers do not reflect all the votes cast by Mexicans abroad, because thousands of people that live in the border states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas crossed over to Mexico to vote in special booths located in Chihuahua, Baja California, Sonora and Tamaulipas. These votes were not considered by IFE as “votes from abroad.”

The process enabling Mexicans to exercise their right to vote from abroad (approved in February 2005), asserts Felipe Aguirre, was “rigged” from the start by PAN militants that used associations of Mexicans in California to manipulate the vote in favor of their candidate.

Just as they did in Mexico, in Southern California, the PANistas used the state databases of civil organizations, clubs and federations – here, with the complicity and coordination of the Mexican consulate – to identify citizens’ voting preferences.

Armed with this information, PANistas easily obstructed the registration of those not in organizations that openly sympathized with their party.

These accusations point to former Secretary of Social Development Josefina Vásquez Mota, who left her post early this year to join Calderón’s campaign team. Under her watch, with help from the consulate, the personal information of every organization of Mexicans living in the United States was used to determine the amount of federal monies destined to development projects in the home communities of these U.S.-based immigrants; even though many of these projects were half-funded by the financial resources of the migrants themselves. This relation was exploited by making resources conditional on the support of the PAN and its candidate.

Aguirre, who is also Maywood, California’s vice mayor, adds that before the presidential elections, private associations were created to serve the PAN, such as the Council of Mexican Federations (COFEM), which received a $4 million grant from the Ford Foundation to strengthen the organizations and federations of Mexicans in the U.S. that have existed for many years and traditionally sympathize with the PRD.

A group of PRD supporters in Los Angeles demonstrated in front of the Mexican Consulate on July 5 to demand that the election be “made clean.” They said they would continue protesting until a vote-by-vote recount is undertaken.

With the claim that elections must be “clean and clear,” opponents of the IFE’s behavior demanded that the pro-PAN bias of this electoral institution cease.

All this has occurred in spite of the PRD’s leadership showing little interest in publicizing its proposals among the immigrant population and lacking a consistent campaign on this side of the Rio Grande.

To make matters worse, the PRD finds itself divided in these lands after having named José Jaques Medina as the president of its organization in the United States. This disturbed the party’s social bases, many of whom consider Jaques Medina to be a person focused on his own political interests and not in the immigrant community.


The Odyssey of Those Who Hoped to Vote

On July 2, a caravan of around 500 people left Los Angeles to vote in Tijuana, where they were witness to the insufficient supply of ballots.

It should be noted that most of those who went to vote in Mexico are people who enjoy dual citizenship, which allows them to leave and enter the United States freely. The undocumented wouldn’t dream of risking a border crossing just to vote for the next president of the Republic.

Another factor: the cost of traveling to Tijuana and back could only be paid by those who have a certain economic stability, in contrast to those who live day-by-day earning minimum wage that must cover rent, telephone and other utility bills, in addition to remittances sent back home to their families in Mexico.

Chihuahua-born journalist Rubén Tapia, who has lived in Los Angeles for more than 25 years, said he was very upset by the IFE’s trickery. In his case, Tapia requested an absentee voter form ahead of time. He sent the documents that the IFE requested but the IFE sent them back him, saying that he needed to send a copy of his voter’s credential on both sides of the documentation. Once again he sent in his documents, spending $9, but the IFE again insisted that his documentation was incomplete.

Rubén Tapia explained that he called the toll-free number on the IFE website several times to file a complaint about this anomaly. Fed up with the bureaucracy and the hysterical secretaries who could never give him a valid reason for the hold-ups, he remained insistent but never received a solution. He even had a serious talk with IFE official Oscar Mora, but still nothing happened. Tapia eventually spent more than $100 in gasoline in order to travel to Tijuana to vote.

The community journalist was one of the Mexican citizens who lobbied the Mexican Congress for the right to vote of Mexican expatriates.

David Silva, another voter who traveled to Tijuana, said that many Mexicans were unable to vote their due to the lack of ballots.

He said that many Mexicans who wanted their votes to be counted were upset, and felt that the Mexican government is using a sort of slight-of-hand to make their votes vanish.

For his part, Juan José Gutiérrez, director of the Latino Movement USA, said that in this electoral process “ten million Mexicans who were denied our right to vote were left out of the game,” in an “extremely foul process in which not all of us could participate” thanks to “the PRI and PAN’s trickery.”

As some observers have commented, the “Other Side” is a microcosm of Mexico. The borer states of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas are a sort of “extension” of Mexico, at least in terms of their high numbers of Mexican immigrants.

As we can see, opinions vary, depending on who expresses them. The numbers also tilt back and forth in the endless dance of statistics, depending on who calculates them and what his intentions are.

For working people like Cristina González – a native of the Costa Grande region of Guerrero who works for minimum wage ($6.75 per hour) in a shrimp packing plant in Huntington Park – all the candidates are the same. “There is much corruption. The truth is there is no hope for change in Mexico, no matter who wins. The only hope is that god allows me to keep working,” she said.

[mistertrickster]

37. The beautiful thing about this is two fold--one, Obrador is taking it to

the streets, and two, when the full scope of the election fraud is revealed, it will remind us citizens in the US what happened in the last TWO elections here.

[philly_bob]

38. Ratio of presidential vote/candidate for local office vote?

This is from Prensa Latina, a rather clumsy English translation at http://tinyurl.com/polpq

"They (scientists) also assured the voting in states where (Obrador) ... coalition won, was always lower than that held for deputies (500) and senators (128), whereas that to elect Calderon was in inverse proportion."

Difficult to parse this out, but I think it means where Obrador won, there were always less votes for Obrador than for the candidate for local office, and where Calderon won, there were always more votes for Calderon than for the candidate for local office.

If this is true in the Obrador/Calderon election, that would be ALMOST a smoking gun. Certainly strong circumstantial evidence of machine fraud.

Anybody know if this has been tested on 2004 American results?

Also, to anybody just beginning to accept the possibility of right-wing election fraud in 2000, 2004, and now 2006: that feeling of disorientation and stark fear is entirely natural.

[Judi Lynn]

39. Thanks for the link to Prensa Latina. Very interesting.

Welcome to D.U., philly_bob!