The 2006 Mexican presidential election set the stage for this year's July 5 national election for Mexico's bicameral Congress of the Union consisting of the Chamber of Representatives (500 members) and the Senate (128 members). As of June 25, 2009, the two major candidates for president in 2006 see the election system as biased and flawed. ALMO's affirmation is explicit and Calderon says that the problems are related to class issues. .
Numerous irregularities in 2006 raised suspicions. ALMO ran an effective campaign and was expected to win. Independent analysis of the early vote reports indicated that there was little relationship between actual precinct totals and those reported by the Federal Electoral Institute, the IFE.
A graph of the initial results also revealed an odd statistical curve that looked more like the result of a computer algorithm rather than real vote totals. Less than a week after the election, after analyzing this data Jorge A. López, Ph.D., a physics professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, concluded that, "The bottom line is that the data presented is ill, so ill that it appears to have been given artificial life by a computer algorithm."
That finding is of interest because the brother-in-law of PAN candidate Calderon was the contract to program the IFE vote reporting system.
The flood of election irregularities added up to election fraud for millions of Mexicans. Over the second half of 2006, many demonstrated and met in Mexico City to plan and implement an alternative government in Mexico's federal region, a right guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution.
How can Mexican citizens trust the electoral process to reflect their will? And why should they?
In the 1988 presidential contest, when it was apparent that his party would lose their first presidential election in decades, PRI President Miguel de la Madrid arbitrarily stopped vote counting and simply announced that the losing candidate (from his party), Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had been elected president of Mexico. de la Madrid told this story in a 2004 autobiography, 16 years after the election. The people of Mexico and the popular Mexico City mayor, Cuauhte'moc Cardenas, representing what is now known as the PRD, had the presidency stolen from them by the direct admission of the election thief. New York Times, Mar 9, 2004
The belated confession by de la Madrid is another moment of unvarnished truth.
As a result of the scandal of 1988, just according to what was known at the time, the Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) was formed based on the input from European specialists. The 1994 and 2000 presidential elections, along with the 1997 legislative contests, were seen as honest vote counts.
But there is still a major theme of distrust running through the Mexican electorate. Why else would the IFE official in charge of the 2006 election, Luis Carlos Ugalde, make these comments about the current electoral system?
High Stakes in the Election for Congress
In 2009, the stakes couldn't be higher for Mexico's citizens.
The country is running out of funds and may need $50 billion just to get through 2010.
A domestic war between the government and narco-traffickers rages through the nation. At least 12,000, likely many more, have been killed since 2007 in an extension of the U.S. war on drugs.
Migration out of Mexico has reached nearly 800,000 a year. The remaining labor force is strapped with taxes to cover the functions of federal, state, and local governments. There is inbound migration from the United States due to the economic collapse and absence of work.
Numerous irregularities in 2006 raised suspicions. ALMO ran an effective campaign and was expected to win. Independent analysis of the early vote reports indicated that there was little relationship between actual precinct totals and those reported by the Federal Electoral Institute, the IFE.
A graph of the initial results also revealed an odd statistical curve that looked more like the result of a computer algorithm rather than real vote totals. Less than a week after the election, after analyzing this data Jorge A. López, Ph.D., a physics professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, concluded that, "The bottom line is that the data presented is ill, so ill that it appears to have been given artificial life by a computer algorithm."
That finding is of interest because the brother-in-law of PAN candidate Calderon was the contract to program the IFE vote reporting system.
How can Mexican citizens trust the electoral process to reflect their will? And why should they?
In the 1988 presidential contest, when it was apparent that his party would lose their first presidential election in decades, PRI President Miguel de la Madrid arbitrarily stopped vote counting and simply announced that the losing candidate (from his party), Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had been elected president of Mexico. de la Madrid told this story in a 2004 autobiography, 16 years after the election. The people of Mexico and the popular Mexico City mayor, Cuauhte'moc Cardenas, representing what is now known as the PRD, had the presidency stolen from them by the direct admission of the election thief. New York Times, Mar 9, 2004
The belated confession by de la Madrid is another moment of unvarnished truth.
As a result of the scandal of 1988, just according to what was known at the time, the Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) was formed based on the input from European specialists. The 1994 and 2000 presidential elections, along with the 1997 legislative contests, were seen as honest vote counts.
But there is still a major theme of distrust running through the Mexican electorate. Why else would the IFE official in charge of the 2006 election, Luis Carlos Ugalde, make these comments about the current electoral system?
"In place of representing the voice of the citizenry, it strengthens the political parties, constricts the freedom of expression and the spaces available for participation, this is to say, it is oppressive, hidden from public view, that it works with political propositions but that it has come to hand the power to speak to analysts who are for economic change before electoral change, the first insufficient, the second oppressive." El Universal, June 23, 2009
However, amidst his inspiring rhetoric, Ugalde failed to mention the many charges against IFE, the government agency he ran, in what is still thought of by many citizens as a stolen election.High Stakes in the Election for Congress
In 2009, the stakes couldn't be higher for Mexico's citizens.
The country is running out of funds and may need $50 billion just to get through 2010.
A domestic war between the government and narco-traffickers rages through the nation. At least 12,000, likely many more, have been killed since 2007 in an extension of the U.S. war on drugs.
Migration out of Mexico has reached nearly 800,000 a year. The remaining labor force is strapped with taxes to cover the functions of federal, state, and local governments. There is inbound migration from the United States due to the economic collapse and absence of work.
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