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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2006 
Apathy Blamed for Mexico's Low Absentee Voting Rate
 David Gaddis Smith - Copley News
| | Scholars also cite distrust as a reason for why only 50,000 out of millions living abroad chose to cast ballots. |
Many voters in Mexico are apathetic, so it is no surprise that many Mexicans living outside the country also are apathetic about elections, a Mexican scholar said last week, suggesting that is why only about 50,000 of the millions of Mexicans living abroad registered to vote by mail by last month's deadline.
Mexicans "also distrust the Mexican postal system," Raul Rodriguez of CETYS university in Tijuana said at a Trans-Border Institute forum at the University of San Diego.
Absentee votes are not going to make much of a difference in Mexico's July 2 presidential election, said Todd Eisenstadt, a political scientist at American University.
The vote of Mexicans living outside the country this year "will probably be a dress rehearsal for the vote abroad in 2012," he said.
Mexico's federal Electoral Institute came under harsh criticism for all the rules and regulations it established for the vote. The forum participants said the barriers discouraged registration.
Rodrigo Martinez Sandoval, dean of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana, said undocumented Mexicans often do not want their whereabouts known, but the voter applications required them to list where they lived.
Undocumented workers "don't trust anybody with their address in the U.S.," said Martinez Sandoval, who also is a Baja California electoral official. |
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