On election day July 2, 2006, roughly 913,000 citizen functionaries reported for duty at more than 130,000 polling places across Mexico. To ensure that no one resorted to old election tricks, the election was scrutinized by some 1.24 million party representatives as well as 25,000 domestic and 693 accredited foreign election observers. On election day 2006, the IFE did not receive a single report of anyone attempting to rig the vote. The election proceeded so smoothly that the next day the New York Times ran the following headline, “On a peaceful election day across Mexico, growing signs of a maturing democracy.”32
The IFE devised three vote tabulation systems to provide certainty and quick cloture to the election. The first to come into play, called the “rapid count,” compiled the returns from 7,636 polling places that were preselected to represent the nation as a whole. It was designed to allow authorities to call the election by 11 p. m. on election day. The second, called the Preliminary Election Results Program (PREP), was a tabulation of all the tally sheets as they were delivered to 300 district headquarters around Mexico. The formal count—known as the district count— began on Wednesday, July 5, after all the ballots and tally sheets had been received in the district headquarters. It involved a careful examination of tally sheets and ballots, the resolution of arithmetic errors by recounting the ballots, and the transmission of data to the national IFE office. To prevent the alteration of vote totals during this process, party representatives were allowed to observe data collection. In addition, the vote count from each polling place was posted on the internet, so party representatives could ensure they were not altered once the ballots were removed from the polling place.33
At 11 p. m. on election day, IFE President Luis Carlos Ugalde appeared on national television and announced that the election was too close to call based on the rapid count. On Monday, July 3, the IFE reported that the PREP count gave Calderon a 1.04 percent advantage. What the public was not told was that 8 percent of the tally sheets, representing 3.5 million votes, were not included in the total since they showed arithmetic errors. This was in keeping with the IFE protocol for the PREP, but created a public relations disaster as AMLO supporters cried fraud. At 8 a. m. on Wednesday July 5 the definitive district count began at each of the 300 district headquarters where the ballots were stored. Finally, on Thursday, the count ended with Calderon being credited with 0.58 percent more votes than Lopez Obrador.34
Lopez Obrador, rather than conceding what appeared to be an extremely close election, charged election fraud and mobilized his supporters to defend the victory he claimed. On July 8, 500,000 AMLO supporters rallied in Mexico City’s main plaza to protest “election fraud.” On July 16, more than a million gathered in the plaza in one of the largest political demonstrations in Mexican history. On July 30, AMLO called for a massive sit-in in the plaza, known as the Zocalo, and along a major commercial avenue, the Paseo de la Reforma. The five-mile-long sit-in was the equivalent in length and impact to a prolonged sit-in blocking New York’s Broadway from Houston Street to 92nd Street. This occupation lasted until September 15—a month and a half—creating a strong visual presence to remind Mexicans that AMLO did not accept the official results. Demonstrators prevented President Fox from entering the Zocalo to give his usual Independence Day “grito.” PRD legislators in the Chamber of Deputies seized the podium and prevented Fox from delivering his annual state of the nation address to Congress on September 1. PRD legislators also attempted, but failed, to prevent Calderon from taking the oath of office before Congress on December 1.
In addition to mobilizing his supporters, Lopez Obrador called for the Federal Electoral Tribunal to order a recount of all ballots in hopes of erasing his vote deficit. He also called on the Tribunal to consider irregularities that had occurred before election day. In response, on August 5, the Tribunal ordered a recount of ballots from 9 percent of the polling places, selected from areas where the PAN was strong and the PRD weak. Presumably this would be where the PAN had rigged the vote count, if in fact it had been rigged.35
On September 5, the Federal Electoral Tribunal ruled that, after taking into consideration the slight modification found by the recount, Calderon had won by 233,831 of the 41.6 million votes cast. According to Mexican law, decisions by the Federal Election Tribunal are final and cannot be appealed.
The Tribunal acknowledged that both the Fox administration and the Businessmen Coordinating Council had orchestrated media campaigns against Lopez Obrador. However, it concluded this was not sufficient cause to nullify the election:
The negative effects of a campaign of this nature cannot be measured precisely, since there are no objective criteria which will allow one to establish a cause-effect relationship between negative campaigning and the votes cast in an election.36
Total does not equal 100 percent due to the presence of two small parties on the ballot, some votes being cast for unregistered candidates, and some ballots being nullified
The Tribunal did not clarify just what type of behavior would be sufficient to cause the election to be annulled. Clearly it did not feel that either Fox spending 60 percent more on his anti-AMLO campaign between January 19 and May 22 than Calderon was spending on his own campaign ads or the Businessmen Coordinating Council (CCE) spending $12 million illegally were sufficient.37
For the PAN, the July 2 elections, while not the resounding endorsement its members had hoped for, did provide six more years during which to administer the country and promote reform. This task was facilitated by the party receiving 206 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, a fifty-five-seat increase from 2003—2006, and fifty-two senate seats, a five-seat increase.38
The PRD, depending on one’s point of view, was either defrauded of the presidency or more than doubled the presidential vote it had won in 1994 and 2000. The party emerged as the second power in the Chamber of Deputies with 127 seats, a thirty-seat increase from 2003—2006, and twenty-six senate seats, an eleven-seat increase.
The PRI’s showing, the worst in its history, resulted from: 1) Madrazo going into the race with the highest negative rating—more than 40 percent—of any candidate, 2) his being unpopular in the State of Mexico for having driven favorite son Arturo Montiel out of the primary election, 3) his reminding people, as historian Enrique Krauze put it, of “the PRI’s dark past of manipulation, corruption, and disinformation”, and 4) the inability of the PRI and Madrazo to enunciate a clear ideology with which to appeal to voters. Even though the party’s vote fell far below its past levels, the returns did show that, despite many predictions, it was still far from dead. It retained 106 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and with thirty-three senate seats it had the second largest delegation in that chamber. Although the PRI remained a minority party, its strength was enhanced by the PAN desperately needing allies to pass legislation.39
The 2006 election only appears to be close when viewed in the aggregate. When viewed on a state-by-state basis, the results are strikingly different. In the sixteen states where Calderon was declared to be the winner, his average margin of victory was 21 percent. Voters in these predominantly northern states strongly backed the increased integration to the world market that he promised. In the Federal District and the fifteen states that Lopez Obrador won, voters provided him with a 17 percent margin of victory. These are the states further south where few of the benefits of NAFTA have arrived and where the government, rather than being viewed as the problem, is still considered to be the solution to pressing social problems.
The attack ads—referred to by former PRD President Porfirio Munoz Ledo as “the repeated propagation of lies”—undermined Lopez Obrador. The Election Tribunal commented that Fox’s many publicly funded TV spots “put at risk the validity” of the election. Finally, the Business Coordinating Council’s massive media buys, despite the prohibition on anyone other than political parties buying political ads, constituted an unfair advantage. As historian Enrique Semo noted, “Never before has the Mexican business elite intervened as flagrantly and directly in a political campaign.”40
Calderon’s team, after its reorganization in March, ran a well organized, media-driven campaign. To a large extent, Calderon successfully transformed the election into a referendum on the Fox administration. By mid-2006, Fox had chalked up enough success in lowering inflation and interest
Figure 29.1 Map of 2006 election results Source: Reproduced courtesy New Left Review
Rates, increasing foreign reserves and consumer credit, and maintaining anti-poverty programs that voters opted to continue with the PAN.41
In contrast, AMLO and his election team made repeated mistakes, including the following:
¦ AMLO repeated the errors of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’s earlier campaigns since he was more at home in town squares with a loudspeaker than on TV and radio. One of AMLO’s collaborators lamented, “Unfortunately, at the beginning of the campaign, we didn’t realize that a TV spot is worth more than three plazas full of people.”42
¦ AMLO was slow to respond to the PAN attack ads that proved so effective. Mexican presidential campaigns have become Americanized and a failure to respond promptly in the media is fatal.43
¦ In February, when polls showed him to be well ahead, AMLO referred to President Fox as a chattering bird (the chachalaca) and told him to “shut up” and stay out of the campaign. For a period, Lopez Obrador treated this as a joke and supporters even brought caged chachalacas to his rallies as campaign mascots. Eventually the PRD candidate realized this lack of respect for the office of the president was costing him support among swing voters and ceased using the term.
¦ AMLO skipped the first of two debates on April 25 to prevent all the other candidates from ganging up on him. For the same reason, in Brazil’s 2006 presidential election, front-runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva skipped the debate and went on to win. However, in AMLO’s case, his debate absence was widely seen as a sign of arrogance and contemptuousness of others’ viewpoints.44
¦ By early 2006, most voters had made up their minds. The election was lost by AMLO’s failure to hold the middle ground—those making roughly $1,000 a month. Calderon addressed them, declaring that their level of well-being resulted from the macroeconomic stability Mexico had enjoyed since 1995 and that electing AMLO would produce an economic crisis that would drag them back into poverty. AMLO never addressed their concerns, since he focused on the poor, who were in his camp already. Between February and July, AMLO lost 13 percent of his support among this group—more than enough to swing the election.45
Rather than letting the public forget AMLO’s missteps, PAN propaganda kept them alive in voters’ minds. One PAN attack ad juxtaposed AMLO’s chachalaca remark with images of Venezuelan President Chavez dissing Fox, while another commented that AMLO skipped the first debate “because he can’t explain unemployment in Mexico City.”46
The AMLO campaign blamed (and continues to blame) his loss on election fraud. Some of these claims area easily refuted. Just after the election, Lopez Obrador went on national TV to provide an example of what he considered fraud. A video clip of polling place 2227 in Salamanca, Guanajuato, showed the president of the polling place dropping several ballots in the ballot box. It turned out that voters had simply placed the ballots in the wrong ballot box. With the consent of the poll watchers, including the PRD representative, the ballots were simply being deposited in the correct box. AMLO, rather than admitting a mistake, suggested the woman serving as the PRD poll watcher had been suborned. Similarly, as results from the first full count, the PREP, came in, Lopez Obrador’s computer experts claimed an algorithm was altering the order in which data was tabulated, thus putting Calderon at an advantage. Those imagining such an algorithm failed to consider the mathematical principle of commutativity, which holds that regardless of the order numbers are added, adding the same numbers will yield the same sum. The apparent statistical anomaly favoring Calderon resulted from urban votes, which favored the PAN candidate, being reported earlier than rural votes. Furthermore, as former IFE president Jose Woldenberg commented, rigging the PREP would be fruitless since it is the district count, not the preliminary PREP, that determines the
Other charges, given the failure of the Federal Electoral Tribunal to order a full recount, simply hang in limbo. The interests of Mexican democracy would have been better served if the Federal Electoral Tribunal had followed the Costa Rican example and ordered a full recount. In the 2006 presidential elections in Costa Rica, Oscar Arias was declared winner by a 3,648-vote margin. A full recount confirmed his victory.
This leaves the question of whether a well-organized fraud—as opposed to Fox using the bully pulpit of the presidency, the private sector’s massive ad buys, and the PAN using social welfare rolls to drum up support—actually occurred. Negative propositions are notoriously hard to prove, but placing the vote handling in the hands of almost a million citizens makes such a conspiracy unlikely. As Woldenberg commented:
I share the idea that an orchestrated fraud, understood as a conspiracy to change the result of the elections, is impossible. This I strongly affirm, not as an act of faith, but due to the way the electoral process is structured. . . One must distinguish between errors, irregularity, and fraud. It is part of human nature to make mistakes, especially when the elections are administered by so many non-professionals who generously donate their time.48
Lopez Obrador’s post-election protests did not overturn the election, but they did undermine the broad base of support that he had built up during the campaign. On August 3, 140 intellectuals signed a statement denouncing the occupation of Mexico City streets. The next day another 500 artists and intellectuals, including Elena Poniatowski and Carlos Monsivais signed a similar statement. While Lopez Obrador’s core supporters occupied protest encampments, business owners and auto drivers grew increasingly resentful of the protestors’ presence. Finally, and most importantly, the public in general remained unconvinced that fraud had actually occurred. A poll published August 27 by the newspaper Reforma found only 33 percent of those queried believed the election had been fraudulent.49
World History
