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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Calderón's Win in Rural Region Fuels Charges of Election Fraud
 Hector Tobar - LATimes
| | A follower of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador looks at some supporters posters sticked outside the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) headquarters in Mexico City. Supporters of Lopez Obrador hit the streets to demand a vote recount, as president elect Felipe Calderon urged calm and said he would accept a partial recount. (AFP/Omar Torres) |
Valle de Santiago, Mexico - Before last week, this rural region in the Mexican heartland state of Guanajuato was famous for producing some of the biggest vegetables Mexico has ever seen: a 90-pound cabbage and onions as big as volleyballs.
Now Valle de Santiago has produced another bountiful harvest, this one for conservative presidential candidate Felipe Calderón. The overwhelming margins of victory for Calderón in towns across Guanajuato - a victory of almost 3-1 here, for example - were essential to his narrow nationwide triumph.
Backers of his rival, leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, call those margins a harvest of fraud. They produce precinct tally sheets with numerous inconsistencies to back up their claims. The inconsistencies are enough to justify reopening the ballot boxes and recounting the votes, they say.
Calderón's supporters argue the documents show nothing more nefarious than simple human error. They say their candidate won big simply because he and his National Action Party, or PAN, are more popular here, in the home state of President Vicente Fox, than anywhere else.
A review of precinct tally sheets in Valle de Santiago found ample proof of sloppiness in the vote counting, including many mathematical and typographical errors, but no overt evidence of fraud.
In Guanajuato's District 13, one of 300 electoral districts across Mexico, Calderón piled up a 44,000 vote margin, equivalent to almost one-fifth of his nationwide edge over López Obrador, candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.
López Obrador's supporters express disbelief over that margin. "Valle de Santiago is the strongest bastion of the PRD in Guanajuato," said Miguel Luna, a PRD congressional deputy . "It doesn't make any sense that they would give us such a terrible beating here."
Among the inconsistencies that PRD supporters cite: two precinct reports show polling stations at street addresses that do not exist in the city listed. In another precinct, two different vote totals were listed for Calderón. In others, the sum of leftover blank ballots, discarded ballots, and votes cast did not equal the number of ballots issued to a precinct - though the difference was often just one or two ballots.
"I've been in politics for 25 years, and my gut feeling tells me that the will of the people here was not expressed in the tally of the votes," Luna said. "Double voting and a double reporting of precincts took place."
Luis Manuel Ramírez González, the PAN leader in Valle de Santiago, concedes that the precinct tally sheets show human errors, but insists that they are not evidence of any larger conspiracy. "There are logical explanations, but the opposition is only interested in theatrics."
Guanajuato, west of Mexico City , is a bastion of conservative Catholicism. Fox remains widely popular here. Calderón's majority in Guanajuato was slightly smaller than Fox's six years ago when he became the first PAN member to win the presidency. |
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