Mexico City – Mexico started a new cycle of suspense Wednesday as authorities began the final official tabulation of votes from Sunday’s presidential election, in which preliminary results separated the candidates by less than 1 percentage point.
With tallies taken from 86 percent of the polling places, electoral authorities reported that the tally was tilting toward the leftist candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who had 36.4 percent of the vote, while the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, had 34.8 percent.
With a race this close, the results were considered far from final. But they indicated a clear shift from the preliminary count, which showed Calderon in the lead from the beginning, and ended giving him the narrowest of margins, 0.6 percent.
The official count began amid a volatile political storm kicked up on Tuesday by the announcement by federal electoral authorities that some 2 million votes went untabulated in the preliminary count, by demands from Lopez Obrador for a vote-by-vote recount, and by objections to those demands from the government.
Calderon, backed by big business and President Vicente Fox, appeared before the news media to repeat his claims of victory.
Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who has the support of the poor, held his own news conference to restate his case that the election had been rigged against him.
Lopez Obrador said his campaign had uncovered irregularities at tens of thousands of polling places.
Among them, he said, there were polls where the numbers of votes exceeded either the numbers of registered voters or the numbers of ballots. He said that in some cases votes from a single polling place had been tabulated several times.
“So what are we asking for?” Lopez Obrador said. “That they conduct a full revision, poll by poll. We will act responsibly, as always.
“But we are asking the authorities to help clear up any doubts, to review inconsistencies and to not allow the will of the citizens to be violated.”
Election fraud
Major incidents of fraud in Mexico’s presidential elections:
1988: Early returns show leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas leading, but a computerized election system mysteriously fails. When it is reconnected hours later, Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, candidate Carlos Salinas wins by a narrow margin.
1958: PRI candidate Adolfo Lopez Mateos defeats National Action Party, or PAN, candidate Luis Alvarez with 90.56 percent of the vote. Alvarez was not allowed any radio time and was jailed during the campaign on the charge of “being an opposition candidate.”
1940: PRI candidate Manuel Avila Camacho wins with 93.9 percent of the vote over independent Gen. Juan Andrew Almazan in an election marred by violent clashes and credible accusations of vote fraud.