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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2005 
Congress Urged By Activists To Give Approval
 Wire services
Mexico City — Activists demanded Tuesday that Congress quickly call a special session to approve absentee voting for millions of Mexicans living abroad, mainly in the United States, saying the proposal won't be ready for the 2006 presidential elections if legislators don't act by a June 30 deadline.
The roughly 11 million Mexican citizens living in the United States account for about 4 million of the nation's 69 million registered voters. They have the legal right to vote, but must return to Mexico to cast a ballot.
Activists of the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad said the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has backed two different versions of bills for absentee voting, creating a legislative deadlock that threatens to kill both measures.
They claim the PRI fears migrants who left the country for lack of work would vote against it.
The PRI the largest voting block in both houses of Congress denies that, saying it supports voting abroad and is urging other parties to agree to call a special session to take up the issue. Either way, the political stakes are high.
"Excluding millions of Mexicans living abroad from the right to vote will hurt the legitimacy of the 2006 elections," said coalition activist Gonzálo Badillo.
Badillo told a news conference that the Constitution bans making any further changes in electoral laws in the year before the July 2, 2006, elections. Thus, Congress must act by the end of June.
However, Congress is currently not in session and is not scheduled to return to regular sessions until Sept. 1. Unless a special session is called, the bill will die.
In March, the lower house approved a bill to allow migrants to vote in person at special polling places abroad, but in April the Senate approved a PRI proposal for mail-in ballots.
Unless the differences in the two bills are reconciled, neither will be implemented.
"We have suggested a special session. We're waiting for a consensus to be reached on that," said Alfonso Macin, the PRI spokesman in the lower house of Congress.
Voting "would be one of the issues to be taken up in that session," Macin said.
Juan Manuel Sandoval, a professor of Chicano studies at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said "this is the same position (the PRI has) always had, of saying they're in favor of voting abroad, but citing technical difficulties."
Sandoval said that position was due to the fact that in the 1980s, studies showed that support for the PRI "is lower along the border and among Mexicans living in the United States."
The coalition stressed the party has little to fear. Other studies suggested that support for the PRI abroad "is about the same as in the rest of the country," Sandoval said.
And even a 10 percent turnout by voters abroad would be above expectations, the coalition said, given that, under the Senate plan, voters would have to request absentee ballots months before the vote.
The mail-in plan was approved because legislators were worried about the cost and legal hassles of setting up thousands of polling stations in the United States.
Former Chicago Mexican consul Leonardo Ffrench said the vote, however small, would mark an important milestone for migrants.
"How are Mexican legislators going to ask their U.S. counterparts to respect the rights of migrants," Ffrench said, "when the U.S. lawmakers could quite easily say, 'Why don't you start at home, and respect their right to vote?'" |
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