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 News from Around the Americas | November 2005 
Centers to Help Migrants Register
 Wire services
| | For the first time in 2006, Mexicans living abroad will be able to request absentee ballots for a presidential election. |
Federal authorities are setting up special voter registration centers for Mexicans who live abroad but return to their home country for the holidays, as part of the first mass effort to distribute absentee ballots for presidential elections, officials said this week.
The 15 centers will be located mainly in border cities, as well as in three main urban centers Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.
The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has already opened the first two centers in the border city of Mexicali and in Guadalajara, and plan to have the others up and running soon.
The centers will rapidly process applications for voter registration cards, in order to have them ready before migrants return to the United States.
For the first time in 2006, Mexicans living abroad will be able to request absentee ballots for a presidential election.
However, they must already be registered in Mexico in order to get ballots sent to their U.S. addresses.
The centers will operate through March 31, and will also pass out absentee ballot request forms. The centers will also be located in Tijuana, Nogales, Agua Prieta, Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, Ciudad Acuña, Reynosa, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo.
The announcement comes after initial figures suggested that Mexicans living abroad have shown little interest in registering to vote ahead of July 2, 2006 presidential elections.
The Electoral Institute sent out 180,900 registration forms in October to eligible voters living abroad but so far only 733 have been mailed back.
Previously under Mexican law, citizens living abroad were allowed to vote, but the government lacked the infrastructure such as absentee ballots to allow them to do so. In June, Congress approved reforms to the law to include those mechanisms.
Under the new law, voters abroad can register on a special list of Mexican expatriates by filling out forms that are available on the Institute's Web site, and at the Mexican Embassy and Mexican consulates in the U.S. and other foreign countries.
The institute will accept ballot request forms until Jan. 15, 2006. Voters who get the forms will be able to send in absentee ballots up until one day before the July 2 elections.
Government officials estimate that 11 million Mexicans live abroad, 98 percent of them in the United States. Of those located in the U.S., about 4 million are believed to be registered voters. |
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