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When it comes to recognizing and reporting on instances of election fraud in the world, the American corporate media appear to take their cue from White House foreign policy. We saw the Bush administration and the US media's haughty ill-regard for the Ukraine elections in 2004; exit polls were amiss, clearly there was a problem. US diplomats, led by Colin Powell, bewailed the vile practice of election fraud when it was the Russian-friendly incumbent Prime Minister Yanukovich who had been doing the vote rigging. US diplomatic remonstration was severe and led to another election, which resulted in the victory of the much more palatable Victor Yushchenko. Standing in opposition to its involvement in the Ukraine election, the White House barely twitched while Egypt's Hosni Mubarak conducted a murderous reign of terror against voters who would likely support the Muslim Brotherhood in that country's most recent parliamentary elections. And the US media barely noticed it as well. But we would see this pattern again regarding reports of extensive irregularities in the Mexican presidential elections: both the White House and the US media would ignore and dismiss the evidence of vote fraud and quickly pronounce the preferred candidate the "winner" of a "free and fair election."

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This year's July 2 presidential election in Mexico promised to be hotly contested. The race was essentially between the candidates of rival parties, former and popular mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and former Energy Secretary Felipe Calderon, of the National Action Party (PAN), the controlling party of current president Vincente Fox. Calderon's election platform would maintain the status quo favoured by the business elite, while Obrador promised a number of progressive measures, including a renegotiation of NAFTA, the "free trade" agreement that has decimated Mexican farmers since it went into effect in 1994. As might be expected, the Bush administration fully supported Calderon's candidacy, the notion of programs for the poor and a renegotiation of NAFTA being completely at odds with current White House policy.

Long before the election, President Fox's government, and Fox himself, tried to prevent Obrador from even entering the election. When a money laundering and bibery scheme meant to implicate Obrador was exposed as a fabricated plot(videotapes of PAN members plotting to prevent Obrador's candidacy have recently surfaced) (1), another plan, the so-called "desufuero scandal," (2) was brought out. The new plan would strip Obrador of his governmental immunity and indict him on what were widely regarded as trumped up charges of ignoring a court injunction concerning the construction of a hospital access road in Mexico City. After widespread protests, President Fox decided that the strategy was not working, and finagled at least a temporary immunity for Obrador.

With such efforts proving fruitless, it was clear that Obrador was going to have a very difficult time come election day. With Obrador well ahead in the polls only months before the election, Calderon, with illegal help from President Fox, launched a vicious negative campaign against the PRD candidate, which had its intended effects, as did a presidential debate that polls showed Calderon had won. Contrary to Mexican election law, President Fox actually ran advertisements attacking Obrador. For this Fox was censured and ordered to refrain. More sly and illegal behaviour came to light when one of Fox's former allies, Arnulfo Montes Cuen, accused Fox of diverting government money from anti-poverty programs to Calderon's campaign coffers. Mere weeks before the election, the two candidates appeared to be dead even in some polls, a condition ripe for election day exploitation.(3)

Indeed, such exploitation was to be expected when it was learned that the Bush administration had awarded a no-bid contract to the company ChoicePoint, ostensibly to provide "counterterrorism databases" on foreigners. This effort was notable for its focus not on the Middle East, but on Latin America and specifically on countries that employed left-leaning governments or were threatening to do so, such as Mexico. Though it is unknown just what Choicepoint's database service provided in Mexico, the company's prior engagement would cause little comfort to those familiar with its employment in the electoral processes of the United States.* And discomfort was observed on the ground by election observers. Official Foreign Observers Barbara Cummings and Jeeni Criscenzo reported that, on election day, they began hearing of "long lines and shortages of ballots in certain locations." Locations, as it happened, where the majority of voters were supporters of Obrador.

Further suspicion fell on the election outcome when it was learned that Felipe Calderón's brother-in-law, Diego Hildebrando Zavala, owned the company, Hildebrando, was responsible for writing the election tabulation software used by the Federal Election Institute (IFE).(5) The IFE also learned that Calderon's party, PAN, had somehow acquired voter registration data, something strictly forbidden under law. The IFE downplayed this as a minor problem, though the extent of the acquisition appeared not to be known.(6) With voter rolls in the hands of party operatives and Hildebrando in control of the tabulation software, the stage was set. A clean election was likely not to appear on Mexico's horizon.

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The night of Mexico's presidential election witnessed objectively strange behaviour, both in the initial, real-time count (the Preliminary Elections Results Program or so-called PREP) and in the behaviour of IFE officials. The IFE reported the PREP count after ten thousand ballot boxes had been tallied; no incremental count had been provided during this initial phase. At this point, Calderon had a lead of more than 4% over Obrador, which, as the evening's PREP count proceeded, sharply and steadily decreased throughout the night.(7) By midnight, many election observers believed that the result was inevitable: Obrador would win the election. However, at 3am the day after the election, the trend suddenly halted and the tally maintained a constant and unwavering margin of 1.1% for Calderon over Obrador.(8)

Not only was the PREP count inconsistent with itself(9) — the vote totals did not match the reported percentage said to have been won by each candidate — but the PREP count was completely at odds with exit polls conducted throughout the day, which reported that Obrador was maintaining a lead of some 2% over Calderon. Exit poll results were not widely known, nor were they disseminated. The publication Proceso had reported that "senior Interior Ministry officials" had contacted Mexican television networks and persuaded them to "keep their exit polls off the air." Other blatantly odd behaviour by IFE officials confounded the PREP count. Some 2.5 million ballots, which Obrador had accused the IFE of withholding during election day, suddenly reappeared in time for the final count. This sudden emergence of 2.5 million ballots trimmed Calderon's initially reported winning margin of 400,000+ votes down to 257,000.(10) The discovery of these "missing ballots" was presaged by previous reports and photographic evidence showing that ballot boxes from at least three precincts, won by Obrador, were discovered in a garbage dump.

When the "final count" (really just a count of the precinct tally sheets) was undertaken, which removed the 10,000 polling station lead Calderon acquired in the PREP count, things were once again looking good for Obrador. On July 5, 2006, Reuters reported that with 75% of polling stations counted, Obrador had a lead of 2.2%(11), completely agreeing with the exit polls from election day. But by the next day, Calderon's numbers mysteriously recovered and moved him into the lead with the slimmest of margins. It was during the tallying of the final 25% of precincts that the voting pattern, constant throughout the count, suddenly exhibited incredible behaviour, with precincts then reporting wins for Calderon by margins of 5 to 1, 10 to 1 and near the very end, ballot ratios of 100 to 1. Professor Victor Romero of Mexico's National University pronounced this turn of precinct events a "miracle" and a statistical impossibility.(12) This certainly appeared to be true, though the miraculous numbers were hardly the result of divine intervention. Videotape emerged clearly showing poll workers actually stuffing ballot boxes.

After the emergence of blatant voter fraud evidence, demands for a full recount would surely follow and, indeed, they came. While pronouncements by the IFE, Calderon, Fox, the Bush administration and many in the mainstream American press had blessed the election as the "cleanest in the history of Mexico" (given Mexico's history, this might actually be true no matter how much fraud eventually turns up), the IFE finally agreed to a partial recount after several enormous public demonstrations — on numerous occasions more than a million people packed the streets of Mexico city — demanded a full recount, the "voto por voto" campaign. The IFE continued to resist such action, claiming that only evidence of ballot box tampering could be used to justify a recount. When videotape evidence (13,14,15) in a number of precinct stations showed that many ballots packets and ballot boxes were, in fact, open, some appearing to have been broken wide open, this was still not sufficient for the IFE to declare what was obvious to almost everyone. There were serious grounds to believe that many ballot boxes had been tampered with and, by extension, the entire election itself was tainted. Though a full recount appeared unlikely given the establishment's resistance to it, a partial recount was forthcoming, a recount that would demonstrate serious problems with the PREP and final count tallies.

Mexico's Supreme Electoral Tribunal (known as TRIFE) ordered a recount of 11,839, about 9% of Mexico's 130,000 precincts. None of the recounted precincts would be ones where the near-impossible ballot ratios of 100 to 1 had been observed. Nor would they be precincts where ballot boxes had been found in the garbage. Despite ignoring what appeared to be the most blatant signs of election fraud, the recount still clearly demonstrated ballot problems and evidence of both ballot box stuffing ("taqueo") and ballot looting ("saqueo"). In only 7% of Mexico's precincts, over 126,000 votes had been altered either through stuffing or looting of ballots. Calderon's total had been enhanced by taqueo and Obrador's reduced by saqueo, diminishing his total.(16) In previous instances of vote fraud on this scale, the TRIFE actually annulled the precincts in question. But TRIFE failed to observe their own precedent. Were these precincts annulled, the decision would have given Obrador the win by 425,000 votes.(17)

But this was not the decision. In fact, TRIFE has since ruled that Calderon's "win" will stand, despite its having ruled that almost 238,000 votes be annulled,(18) which did not significantly alter the overall result. Though TRIFE has not revealed the rationale behind the annulment, nor has a transparent accounting of the recount been produced, it cannot be too much of an exaggeration to imagine that the votes annulled for Calderon were ones that had been stuffed while the annulled votes for Obrador were ones that had disappeared.

Nonetheless, the overall judgment revealed significant problems with the ballots, but TRIFE further refused to acknowledge any larger vote fraud effort, something that, at this point, seems patently clear. In fact, an independent study of the vote recount by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) determined that there was a significant reduction in the vote count for Calderon and an actual gain for Obrador.(19) CEPR notes that this is "inexplicably one-sided," something that should not happen from "mistakes." What is clear from all this is that, in every single instance of partial recounting after the initial PREP tabulation, Calderon's winning margin was reduced, sometimes significantly so, as in the case of the suddenly "rediscovered" 2.5 million ballots by the IFE.

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As consumers of corporate news media in the United States, Americans are generally unaware of most of what has been chronicled here. Many Americans are probably wondering what all that fuss was about in Mexico, if they wonder about it all. In part, this is a result of our general disinterest in international affairs that aren't based in warfare, but it is much more a function of the American media and the manner by which it chose to portray the Mexican elections. To Americans reading US newspapers, Obrador is a "leftist" and a rabble rouser; a grouser clearly unhappy with the result of a "free and fair election." To viewers of television news, the issue of the Mexican elections would have been scarcely a blip amongst reports of terror threats, wars and references to Nazis and "Islamofascists."

In reality, Obrador is much more of a centrist in Mexican politics and, in fact, almost did not receive his party's nomination because of that; Obrador was not nearly left enough. However, Obrador's popularity in Mexico could not be denied, and it was recognised that he would have the best chance to win against Calderon. But Vincente Fox's government and the PAN party mounted a anti-democratic program of illegal campaigning, money laundering and election rigging that simply would not allow the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. That the Bush administration backed Calderon and subsequently declared the Mexican election "clean" says much more about the Bush administration and its policy of "freedom and democracy" than it does about the election itself.

The Mexican election was a profound test of the democratic will of the country. That will was seen in the throngs who protested and demanded a fair election. They did not get one. Sadly, the incumbency of Mexico's ruling elite, beholden as they are to our own country's ruling class, chose power over the people's choice. This is something Americans should be deeply concerned about, not only because Mexico is a close neighbour, but because we need to start recognizing that our hypocrisy regarding the ideal of democratic government is something the rest of the world is well aware of, even if we choose not to be.

* The company, ChoicePoint, sealed its fate in infamy when it had been contracted by Jeb Bush's Florida state government in 2000 to produce the now-notorious felon list that was used to scrub voters from Florida's voter rolls. ChoicePoint's list then was notable for two salient features: it contained very few actual felons, and those listed were mainly Democratic voters, or those thought likely to be so.(4)
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(1) Althaus, D., Lloyd, M.,Tape revives Mexican conspiracy theory, Houston Chronicle, August 19, 2006.
(2) Desafuero is a term in the vernacular that refers to the overall process by which government officials are stripped of immunity to criminal prosecution.
(3) Boudreaux, R., Old-Style Taint Shadows Election in Mexico, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2006.
(4) Palast, G.,BUSH TEAM HELPS RULING PARTY "FLORIDIZE" MEXICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,June 30, 2006.

(5) Giordano, A., A Full Recount …, Narco News, July 8, 2006.
(6) Herrera, J., Reconoce IFE fuga de informacion del padron electoral, El Universal, June 28, 2006.
(7) Lopez, J.A., Dept. of Physics, University of Texas, Data manipulation in the Mexican Election?
(8) ibid.
(9) Galbraith, J.K., Doing maths in Mexico, Comment is free, The Guardian Unlimited, July 17, 2006,
(10) Giordana, A., In Mexico, 2.5 Million Missing Votes Reappear, Narco News, July 5, 2006.
(11) Bell, A., Leftist has surprise lead in Mexico recount drama, Reuters (via ABC News), July 5, 2006.
(12) Palast, G., We don't need no stinking recount, Comment is free, Guardian Unlimited, August 7, 2006.
(13) Luis Mandoki, precinct video 1
(14) Luis Mandoki, precinct video 2
(15) Luis Mandoki, precinct video 3
(16) Giordana, A.,Mexico's Partial Vote Recount … , Narco News, August 14, 2006.
(17) ibid.
(18) Vite, A. Z., Tribunal ratifica ventaja de Felipe, El Universal, August 29, 2006.
(19) Weisbrot, M., CEPR ADDS UP AVAILABLE RECOUNT DATA, FINDS SIGNIFICANT VOTE REDUCTION FOR CALDERON, Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2, 2006.

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