MEXICO CITY — Sunday’s presidential election represents a difficult test for Mexico’s wobbly democracy: Can it hold a fraud-free national vote in the midst of a raging drug war?
The top election official conceded recently that violence in parts of the country prevented election officials from completing some preparations.
But the official, Leonardo Valdes, insisted that safeguards are in place to prevent the kind of brazen electoral fraud once notorious in Mexico. And, he said, most of the strong-arming, threats and payoffs by drug traffickers remain limited to local politics and less influential in the national race.
“Mexican presidential elections today are armored against fraud,” Valdes said. More than 1 million trained poll workers will be deployed in 143,151 voting stations, nearly all of which will also have monitors from at least three political parties.
The specter of fraud looms large this year because the party that perfected the buying of votes and rigging of elections, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is favored to return to the presidency with its telegenic candidate Enrique Pena Nieto.
Despite tighter oversight and strengthened laws to ensure clean elections, analysts say Mexico remains vulnerable to many of the dirty tricks that flourished during PRI rule.
Voter credentials make it easier to confirm a person’s identity, for example, but candidates and parties have turned to handing out discount cards to win influence ahead of voting.
Taking a page from the PRI’s old playbook, all three parties now bus voters to the polls on election day, giving them meals or other perks along the way. Another reported ploy is for voters to take a picture of their marked ballot with a cellphone and later show it to party operatives in return for cash.
“We continue to have elections that have serious problems in terms of legality, equality of access,” said John M. Ackerman, a law professor in Mexico City who has written about the country’s election laws.
Even before the first ballot was cast, leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Pena Nieto’s closest rival, warned of a fraud that would rob him “once again,” as he puts it, of the presidency.
The odds for post-election controversy could hinge on the vote tally. A large margin would weaken potential charges of fraud — one reason why the Pena Nieto campaign hopes polls suggesting a blowout prove accurate.
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Calderon might live abroad • MEXICO CITY — In meetings, President Felipe Calderon has been telling guests that he and his family are likely to leave Mexico to live abroad after his term ends in December. It will be too dangerous to remain, he warns in private conversation, because powerful drug mafias might come after him.
For the commander-in-chief of Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war to suggest he has not provided enough security to live in his country is a stunning revelation — and might be seen as either an admission of failure or evidence of how hard he has fought and how far Mexico needs to go.
Limited to a single six-year term, Calderon remains personally popular, with his ratings hovering around 50 percent. Yet two of every three Mexicans recently surveyed say the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to a spokesman, Calderon is “considering a variety of options both at home and abroad … to contribute to finding solutions to global problems.” They say “security will not be a factor.”
The Washington Post
