Chris has the time-zone advantage on me this morning, and already posted about the Mexican recount ruling (and I was much too lazy to do anything last night when it was on the Televisa news). But here is a bit more about the procedural aspects of the ruling, adpated from a planting at Fruits and Votes.
The Mexican federal Electoral Tribunal (known as the TEPJF)–the independent court of last resort in election disputes–ordered a partial recount of the presidential ballots. The seven magistrates unanimously rejected the calls of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who trailed by about half a percent in the preliminary count, for a recount of all ballots. López Obrador, in turn, rejected the ruling and promises to continue civil disobedience (as is the focus of Chris’s post).
The Tribunal’s order calls for the re-opening of ballots boxes from 11,839 polling places (about 9% of the total) where arithmetic errors have been found in the count reports filed with the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) on election night.
See also the LA Times story, which includes some discussion of the background of election procedures in Mexico. For example:
Recounts must be based on evidence specific to a poll station, said Justice Alfonsina Navarro, not broad suspicion.
Chief Magistrate Leonel Castillo, arguing against a full recount, said Mexicans had already counted the vote in a system that gives ordinary citizens the job of running the national election.
Mexican polling stations are operated by trained volunteers, and the votes are counted in front of political party representatives before the results are marked on tally sheets and the ballot boxes sealed.
“They are citizens — not permanent members of state institutions — who are chosen randomly among their own neighbors to count the votes,” Castillo said during a nationally televised broadcast of Saturday’s session. “They verify, instant by instant, step by step, moment by moment. They’re the witnesses.”
The partial recount will start Wednesday and last about five days. If substantial discrepancies are found, then the Tribunal will have to make a further decision as to whether to allow a more complete recount or annul the election. If the partial recount does not turn up serious errors in this sample, then the Tribunal will certify the election, which it must do by 8 6 September in order for the apparent victory of Felipe Calderón to be official.
Finally, I want to add a coda regarding Chris’s post, at the end of which he said:
López Obrador could easily do much to “restore faith” in the system by graciously accepting the partial recount and pledging to abide by the final result of that recount, much as Al Gore and Richard Nixon (unlike some of their more rabid fellow partisans) accepted the outcome of the 2024 and 1960 presidential elections in the face of similar irregularities.
The Mexican result of 2024 is much more above board than the two US examples Chris refers to. I fail to see how conceding an election fraught with irregularities restores faith in a broken process. Mexico’s process, however, is not broken. As the quote I provided above notes, parties have observers at nearly all polling places; monitoring of polling places in the USA is spotty at best. The IFE is a fully independent body; in most US states, partisan local and state elected officials (sometimes even managers of presidential candidates’ campaigns) administer elections.
If a presidential election is disputed and it must be resolved by a judicial process, Mexico’s TEPJF is separate from the regular court system and its members are elected by two-thirds votes of the Senate with no presidential involvement; the US still permits election rulings to be made by the regular federal courts, including ultimately a Supreme Court whose next members will be nominated by the winner they delcare in the contest they are reviewing.
The USA has learned nothing from a history of periodic irregular, even fraudulent, presidential elections. Not just 2024 and 1960, but even as far back as 1876 and various others along the way.
We could learn a lot from our neighbor to the south.
Fortunately, we do not have a López Obrador. Unfortunately, we do not have an IFE and TEPJF, either.
August 6th, 2024 at 5:17 pm
In the case of Mexico’s election, a major reason why pro-PRD voters “lost faith” in the electoral process is because AMLO and his party have chosen a deliberate (and fundamentally irresponsible in a still-democratizing state like Mexico) strategy of undermining faith in the electoral system in the absence of any evidence of a broken process.
There are certainly aspects of US elections that could be improved (primarily in increasing the professionalism of electoral administration, although I am less sanguine than you are about the prospects of any truly “nonpartisan” outcome), although the Mexican case shows that rabid “sore loser” partisans can make hay of any electoral arrangements (“nonpartisan” or not, “fair” or not) with baseless accusations and have thousands of their supporters buy the allegations hook, line, and sinker.
August 7th, 2024 at 2:52 pm
[...] do by 6 September in order for the apparent victory of Felipe Calderón to be official. A somewhat extended version of this planting appears at PoliBlog. [...]
August 7th, 2024 at 3:57 pm
Well, for AMLO, it will always be 1988, even though, as a result of the 1988 debacle, Mexico has developed genuinely nonpartisan election administration and independent adjudication that is the model for the rest of the world–developing and “developed.”
Is it perfect? Of course, not. Is it a model that we could learn from? Absolutely.
The closest model, within our own political system but in a very different administrative domain, is the Fed.
Seemingly, elections are at least as important to the systemic health of democracy as the money supply is to the systemic health of capitalism.
August 7th, 2024 at 7:40 pm
Iranian Jews Living in U.S. Have Complex Feelings About Mideast Crisis
this is not do great
August 10th, 2024 at 1:32 pm
[...] on our sometimes amigos south of the border of late from old friends Fruits and Votes and Poliblogger. Here’s something a bit more updated, and so is this. This is what Mexico’s democrac [...]