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 Editorials | Opinions | July 2006 
The New Face of Election Fraud in Latin America: Examples from Mexico and Peru
 Maxwell A. Cameron - livinginperu.com
| | In the case of Peru, rather than a recount, judges ruled on the authenticity of voting returns. |
Writing for The Guardian blog "Comment is free..." James Galbraith and Greg Palast have provided a great service by calling attention to the serious possibility of systematic fraud in the Mexican election. Neither offer definitive proof, but both provide information and analysis that, in conjunction with other deficiencies in the process, suggest this election may have been neither free nor fair. Yet I fear there is a danger that in searching for fraud of the sort that occurred in Mexico in 1988 we may miss the real story. The greatest obstacle to clean elections may arise not from systemic fraud but from the politicization of electoral processes.
The case of Peru is instructive. I recall a warning by a former Peruvian official at the outset of the election campaign. He said that systematic fraud by election authorities was unlikely, but incompetence among election officials, especially in the event of a close election, might create a context in which a loser might challenge an election result. Sure enough, one candidate (Lourdes Flores) raised doubts about the outcome, saying that she may have won in the ballot boxes but lost in the vote counting. To make matters worse, the ballots were destroyed after they were counted, making a recount impossible. Rather than a recount, judges ruled on the authenticity of voting returns.
The problem was not systematic fraud by the authorities. Elections are messy, especially when election authorities are badly trained and overworked. Parties must have scrutineers in every voting station to ensure mistakes or irregularities do not occur. Add weak party finance rules and media bias and you create conditions in which losers can’t accept defeat. Even if they believe they lost, both candidates and their strategists may impugn the electoral process in an effort to reinforce their image among supporters.
Something similar may be happening in Mexico. I doubt election authorities, in cahoots with the executive, engineered a massive conspiracy to defeat of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and place Felipe Calderón in Los Pinos. There is, however, plenty of proof of incompetence which, coupled with documented irregularities (and here bloggers deserve credit), provided an opportunity to dispute the outcome. Vote stealing may have occurred in places where the PRD did not have scrutineers. The PREP was designed to offer the image of transparency, but it backfired when officials acknowledged that the PREP count was not the same as the official count.
Mexico is not a country with a high tolerance for computer problems during elections. The historical memory of the computer crash during the fraudulent election of 1988 makes the acceptance of cybernetic irregularities impossible. The fear campaign by Mexico’s entrepreneurial elite—which spent millions in a campaign to convince nervous voters that they would lose everything if AMLO was elected—made it even harder for the PRD to accept defeat.
I am not saying the election was not stolen. It may have been. But so far we have better evidence of incompetence than malfeasance by the authorities. The problem is not just the errors of election authorities, however, but something more systemic: the politicization of state institutions. Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute used to be one of the nation’s most respected public institutions—and a model for the region. Now it has a black eye. Good institutions cannot operate in isolation. The government of President Vicente Fox contributed to undermining its own electoral authorities. As a result, Mexican democracy has suffered a regrettable setback.
Counting votes is not rocket science, but legitimate results are hard to produce when election officials do not inspire confidence and the electoral process is politicized. An exhaustive vote-by-vote recount is necessary, not to appease AMLO or legitimate Calderón, but for the sake of Mexico’s democratic system. Those who chastise AMLO for building a social movement for a recount of the vote forget that such tactics are both legal and democratic. The worrisome reality, however, is that Mexico’s judicial institutions may not be strong enough to serve as neutral umpires.
There is also a lesson here for international election observers. It is not good enough for election observers to arrive a shortly before an election, deploy a small force of observers, accept the assurances of local authorities, and declare the election to be a legitimate exercise. Elections require, among other things, organized parties, a vigorous civil society, and strong public institutions. In the absence of any of these conditions, electoral observation should be widened to include reporting on the state of democracy analogous to the human rights reporting currently conducted under the aegis of the United Nations. |
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