Salon: Mexico 2006: Florida all over again?

[kpete]

Mexico 2006: Florida all over again?
Members of Mexico's losing leftist party are invoking America's recent electoral scandals to convince the world that last Sunday's presidential election was fixed.

By Eliza Barclay

A supporter of Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (left) and a man wearing a mask of presidential candidate Felipe Calderon celebrate in the streets in Mexico City on July 6, 2006.

July 8, 2006 | MEXICO CITY -- "Ciberfraude," or cyberfraud, is not a word in the average Mexican's vocabulary. But most Mexicans have heard of the extraordinary electoral debacle that befell their neighbors to the north in 2000, and Martí Batres, the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Party's Mexico City chapter, was going to capitalize on that knowledge. At a press conference Friday afternoon at PRD headquarters, the close advisor to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist politician who lost an exceedingly close election here this week, nodded to an aide to turn on his laptop. "And now I'm going to show you a video," he told the roomful of reporters.

The lights went out, and on a pull-down screen, computer programmer Clinton Curtis explained in English to an American audience how he had allegedly been hired by Tom Feeney, speaker of Florida's House of Representatives and a Republican, to create a computer code that fixed that state's vote in favor of George W. Bush six years ago. Batres, or someone on YouTube, had added Spanish subtitles to the 3 and a half minute clip. "This video shows that cyberfraud is possible," Batres insisted when the lights came up. "There may have been a source code used to manipulate our elections just as with the Florida elections in 2000."

Rumors of fraud were swirling in Mexico's streets, on TV and on blogs long before Thursday's official count confirmed that Felipe Calderon of the conservative PAN party had beaten Lopez Obrador of PRD by .58 percent, a difference of just 236,000 votes out of 42 million cast. "A black hand was at work, I believe," says Jorge Ortiz, a taxi driver who voted for Lopez Obrador. "The numbers just don't make sense."

Some of the rumors were reminiscent of the bad old days when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ran Mexico without challenge and elections were rife with fraud and ballots were burned in bonfires. There were tales of 3 million votes missing from the preliminary tally issued early in the week, which had Calderon winning by more than a million votes. There were allegations of vote buying and ballots buried in a Mexico City garbage dump.

But the fraud claims made at the PRD press conference were decidedly 21st century and very American. Batres, head of the PRD's Mexico City chapter, detailed several instances where the votes reported by the government's preliminary tabulation system, called the PREP, did not match the actual voting record, always to the deficit of Lopez Obrador and the benefit of Calderon, in one case by as many as 3,828 votes.

more at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/08/mexican_elections/

[GrumpyGreg]

1. Fraud ,or just plain poor loser in a tight race?

[sandrakae]

2. Fraud

They found ballets thrown out. Bush tought Vincente Fox out to cheat an election. It was his party that won.

[MissWaverly]

3. no, fraud, pure unadulterated fraud

3/4's of a million votes with no vote for president
3 million missing votes
a less that 1% winning margin which even triggers a recount here in the old USA
10 ballot boxes found in the trash

see Haiti election, ballots found in dump, resulted in UN intervention and overturning
of election, February 2006

Why because Calderon promises to open Mexican oil fields to foreign investors.

[Skink]

4. It won't be like Florida when they take to the streets.

I think the Republicans should pay attention here.