Mexican election: The only thing missing is James Baker getting red-faced

Remember Florida 2000, where James Baker, redfaced and shouting, created the Republican reality—with the complicity of the press, of course—that Bush had won the election, before the courts had ruled, and before all the votes were counted? (Thank God Joe Lieberman called him on that… Oh, wait…)

Mexico 2006 = Ohio 2004 = Florida 2000. Let’s see why:

The blogosphere doesn’t seem to be working the Mexican election real hard, but let’s try to be at least a little internationalist, OK? After all, every time the wingers capture a national government, it hurts us and our country. (Look at how Berlusconi helped out Bush with the forged yellowcake memos, for example).

So here, as I understand it, is the key legal point for demanding a recount:

“Mexican law is very clear on when a ballot box can be opened: only when there are problems with the vote tallies, when the tally sheet has obviously been changed, or when the box has been tampered with,” Mr. Ugalde said.

But here’s the problem: The only way to check the results of the electronic tally against the physical ballots is to count all the physical ballots—which the law, in its current broken state, forbids. (It’s as if, when when the bank made a mistake in your checking account, you couldn’t open up the envelope with the physical checks in it to check the electronic records, unless the envelope was torn. Who wrote that law? Bob Ney?

The federal government agency that runs the Mexican election system is the IFE, and it would fall to them to handle any recount. Here’s a long and thoughtful post by blogger El Machete on IFE, vote fraud, and the history of Mexican elections:

A reader asks: “Is the IFE dirty?” It’s safe to say that the IFE did not dispel valid doubts about the result and the procedures leading to it. …

Yesterday, Reforma had a piece by José Woldenberg. He and others (José Agustín Ortíz Pinqueti comes to mind) laid the foundations of the current IFE. They persuaded congress to allocate large amounts of money to build its infrastructure, manufacture tamper-proof election IDs, etc. And, to say more about Woldenberg’s background and political genealogy, Woldenberg was a leftist, a founder of the PSUM.

In his article, Woldenberg defends the election, the PREP, and the IFE. He dismisses the idea of “worms” or other pieces of software smuggled into the system to manipulate the results, suggesting it is a silly conspiracy theory. …

[However,] By not opening the ballot packages, the IFE erodes its credibility, which is to say the credibility of the entire political system. And yes, there is an essential commonality between 1988 and 2006: the official winner (the PAN now, like the PRI then) is refusing to open the ballot packages. (Salinas even got the 1988 ballot packages burned, with the support of the PAN.)

Back to Woldenberg — I’m not willing to follow him in his defense of the security of the IFE computer system. Why? One, there are many possible ways in which a computer system can be compromised. And two, the stakes are high and the temptation to get around the locks and manipulate the results is proportional to those stakes. As the Wall Street Journal says, think Florida 2000 — or Ohio 2004. A healthy dose of skepticism, particularly when things look too funny, has nothing to do with being a conspiracy nut.

But even if the IFE central computers weren’t Deibolded, there are plenty of additional techniques in the winger vote fraud playbook:

Woldenberg excludes the mere possibility of a “centrally machinated fraud.” I’m not sure about that either. It depends on what you mean by “centrally.” It’s perfectly possible to go Al Qaeda in committing an electoral fraud. After all, Calderón only needed to wink, insinuate to his followers, mid- and low-level party operatives, etc. that local and individual creativity to advance the goals of the party and stop López Obrador would be duly appreciated. Then you’d have both, a decentralized or retail attempt to commit fraud (therefore hard to pin down) and “plausible deniability” by Calderón and the PAN leaders. Would this kind of fraud suffice? In a tight election, yes.

Sound familiar? Like nodders-and-winkers Ken Blackwell, or Katherine Harris?

Did Calderón, the PAN leadership, and the big donors of his campaign send a message to their troops to cheat? Absolutely. The all-out propaganda campaign launched by the right, a sector of the business class, the government of Vicente Fox, and the leaders of the PAN against López Obrador sent that kind of message. If López Obrador is a “danger to Mexico,” then you get rid of it. You do whatever it takes to stop him — yes, including his assassination.

Sound familiar? I wonder if the Mexican wingers publish people’s addresses too?

Am I exaggerating here? Absolutely not! Again, consider history: in 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the then ruling party (PRI) was killed in a campaign event. If you only read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, you may get the sense that the PAN is a modern political party, led by a dynamic group of highly educated yuppies, with a well groomed, wholesome, Harvard educated candidate. Yes, a stratum of wealthy, white European business people and yuppies with good jobs in the the formal sector, banks, brokerage firms, foreign corporations, etc. is one of the PAN’s core constituencies. Moreover, it is clear that in issues that have the biggest impact on the lives and livelihoods of the Mexican people (i.e. economic policy and management of public resources) this is the group in the PAN that sets the agenda.

But the PAN has another core constituency, a crowd that turns out real votes (and, my suspicious mind would add, some fake ones on top) in densely populated areas of central and western Mexico. It is no accident that two of the states where the PAN has absolutely refused to open the ballot packages are Guanajuato and Jalisco. These states have a long and bloody history of Catholic, right-wing extremism — including terrorism, assassinations, and political intimidation. For more on this, google the word “Yunque”. Or google the name of a journalist who has studied them closely (Álvaro Delgado, from the magazine Proceso).

In brief, I cannot rule out that a “centrally machinated fraud” is being attempted in Mexico. I think there is strong evidence pointing to that possibility. And, in a country like Mexico, with its history, the burden of the proof must fall on the PAN, on the party of the rich and powerful, and on the IFE, an institution that has cost much to the public. With a political floor so uneven, the attribution of political responsibilities must be be apportioned in accordance to wealth, power, and opportunities.

But it is true that, in this electoral cycle, the poor have been all but victims. However imperfect, they have used their organization — and their numbers — to improve their condition. Still, they clearly have an uphill battle. But this game is not over yet.

(See also El Machete’s excellent followup on evidence of irregularities.)

Now, why would Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, and Mexico 2006 seem to similar? One answer: They seem similar because they are similar—the same playbook is being used. (Maybe that’s why the Times editorializes in favor of a complete recount.) And speaking of playbooks, does this sound like Ohio 2004, or what (via Latin America News Review):

Although Sunday’s voting was peaceful and turnout high, reporters in the streets and letters to the press testify to the thousands of voters who waited in line for hours, only to be told that their polling place had run out of ballots. Thousands more were informed that their names had disappeared from the rolls.

And does this sound like Ohio 2004, and Florida 2000:

In claiming he won the Sunday election, Lopez Obrador cited many clear irregularities including manipulating preliminary vote totals, initially never counting 3 millions votes and then in hindsight only counting 2.5 million of them, ignoring 900,000 supposed void, blank and annulled ballots declared null, discarded and never included in the official totals, also never counting over 700,000 additional votes from missing precincts, denying the right to vote to many voters in strong Obrador precincts, and much more.

And for those who like their tinfoil, Deep Intelligence Index introduces the category: “Demonstration Elections”:

What do these presidential elections all have in common: Mexico, 1988, US, 2000, US, 2004, Colombia and Peru, 2006 and the just concluded Mexican election on July 2? In each case, the outcome was “arranged” and known in advance before voters went to the polls. They’re what economist and media and social critic Edward Herman calls “Demonstration Elections” - the characterization and title he gave his 1980s book analyzing and documenting sham elections in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Vietnam. Professor Herman is an expert, and although his book was written over 20 years ago, it’s clear little has changed except for the added sophistication gained since then in the ability of officials to make elections turn out the way they wish. The same fraud occurs in many countries, and Professor Herman might have included many others besides the ones he chose but had he done so he’d have had to have written a book with no end.

Elections that only appear democratic happen throughout the developing world wherever the US has a strategic interest, which these days means everywhere. But they also happen in at least some developed countries, most notably the last two US presidential elections.

It seems the same because it is the same.

UPDATE The FTE is not the final authority. In fact, the election could be annullled. Kossack Miguel:

For those of you who don’t read Spanish, the executive summary is that Eloy Fuentes Cerda, magistrado del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF),the head of the Federal Election Tribunal stated in an interview that the IFE does not determine the winner of the presidential race, that power is solely reserved for the TEPJF. He further stated that if petitioned properly, the Tribunal could annull the election due to the observed irregularities and disputes.

This has happened in several important state elections in the past several years.

This is probably the most important news I have seen on this in the last several days. If this guy and the other judges on the Tribunal can withstand the enormous threats and bribes they will be faced with, Mexico may emerge with a truly transparent election.

Mexico: Calderon's brother-in-law wrote the vote-counting software, and it's already been hacked!

This stinks.

And it’s a very familiar stink.

We’ve got it all. The rush to declare a victor before the votes are counted, the partisan software company—and voting software that’s proven to be hackable. (Read on for how. You’ll never guess what the password was!)

Al Giordano in NarcoNews:

Suspicions about computer-generated fraud – rooted, in part, in the fact that IFE’s computer systems were partly designed by companies and partners of Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala – have been raised anew by the statistical anomalies and inconsistencies both in the PREP counts and hard counts claimed by the IFE, particularly the lack of fluctuation in Madrazo’s hard count tally at the very moments when a radical shift occurred from Obrador to Calderón.

(Note that a full, manual recount is the only antidote for computer fraud.)

But wait, there’s more:

And the fact that IFE chairman Ugalde rushed, at 4 p.m. Thursday, to declare a winner without having transparently reported the region-by-region and state-by-state results (at press time, IFE still has not published them) smells as rotten as the legal fact that Ugalde is not empowered by any law to declare a winner but that he inexplicably did so anyway: that task belongs, legally, to the judicial branch of government, the Trife tribunal.

Ugalde’s illegal hurry suggests motive to literally play fast and loose with the facts, as he has done.

So, in Ugalde, at last we have our Katherine Harris! And our James Baker…

Here’s a little information on Diego Hildebrando Zavala. From The Mex Files:

Those contracts may have been perfectly legitimate — there aren’t that many Mexican data service companies, and Hildebrando SA de CV (and Meta Data, controlled by Diego Zavala ) are two of the few large companies that do this kind of work. STILL… Diego Zavala was denying any contracts existed, and was threatening a civil suit against AMLO for “moral damage” (basically, slander) until someone dug them up in the public record.

OOPS!

Of course they’re legitimate. That’s why Zavala denied they existed!

NOTE Original, in Spanish here. Of course, it would be great if someone could translate. [See here for translatoinof the no-bid contracts story.]

UPDATE The software has already been hacked. And guess how? This only gets better! Mex Files:

It’s slightly embarrassing. IFE, (Instituto Federal Electoral) deservedly is respected world-wide, and just today, was held up as an example of their north of the border friends of how to run a clean election. Unfortunately, the admiring articles in the U.S. press appeared the same day the Institute had to admit that PANistas had “somehow” gotten ahold of voter registration data. Of course, they’re saying it’s minor, though denuncias have already been filed.

Reporter Carmen Aristegui … acting on a tip from some so-far “unnamed source” accessed the data herself, using “Hildebrando117” as her password. “Hildebrando” is, of course, Calderón’s inconvenient brother-in-law.

Funny how all this gets left out of WPo’s coverage….

UPDATE See the Mexican electoral system is stronger than ours.

Critical Faculties Check: Palast & Mexico

Here’s an interesting tidbit from a Josh Holland article of Alternet, where he really takes Palast to task. He says:

Imagine for a moment that you’re Felipe Calderón, a conservative trying to become the next president of Mexico, and you want to rig the election. To pull off your plan, you need a list of Mexican voters.

Here’s a simple question: would you want an accurate list of all registered voters that’s kept up-to-date by the federal election authorities, or would you want an old list from your buddy George W. Bush that’s at least 6 million voters short?

I know which one I’d want, but Greg Palast thinks it’s a toss-up.

Three times this week Palast has insinuated that ChoicePoint, Inc. — the company that he made infamous for removing tens of thousands of Democrats from Florida’s voter rolls in 2000 — may have had a hand in the Mexican election.

He needs ChoicePoint in the mix because it’s the only thread that can connect Bush to the Mexican vote. Yesterday, Palast wrote:

I noted that the Bush Administration, under the guise of a secret War on Terror contract, hired ChoicePoint Inc. to filch the voter and citizen files of Mexico… Were the Mexican rolls “scrubbed” with Dubya’s help?

The answer is: No; Calderón had no use for voter data from Dubya.

Because what Palast’s not telling his readers is that the ChoicePoint story is over three years old. It made a sensation when it was reported in April of 2003. In November of that year, the AP explained that the firm “assembled a database containing the personal information of 65 million voting-age Mexican citizens, information which the U.S. government purchased.”

But during the three and a half years since then, voters have moved, new voters have registered and others have died. During the 2006 election there were 71 million registered voters in Mexico (and the 65 million in ChoicePoint’s database weren’t even registered voters — they were citizens of voting-age).

-snip-

That’s because no independent exit polls showed a López Obrador lead on Sunday. Reuters reported: “With emotions running high, and reports of irregularities trickling in, most media groups declined to reveal the actual results of their polls. Only TV Azteca reported precise numbers, showing Mr. Calderon with a two-percentage-point lead — within the poll’s margin of error. The newspapers Reforma and El Universal and the TV network Televisa said only that the race was a tie.”

Another exit poll, from GEA-ISA — a firm that always had outlier polling showing Calderón up by suspicious margins leading up to the elections — gave the conservative a 4-point lead over López Obrador.

So let’s be clear: all of the independent exit polls — Palast says “exit polls” or “the exit polls” four times — showed either a dead heat or a slim Calderón lead, exactly what the official quick-count showed.

Now, did Greg Palast just make it up out of whole cloth? Almost; here’s the Reuters report upon which he presumably bases the column (he didn’t deny it when given the chance):

While the top election official said it was too close to call, left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his party’s exit polls showed he won by 500,000 votes …
But his rival, Felipe Calderon of the ruling National Action Party, immediately shot back by saying independent exit polls showed him ahead …

So López Obrador — a candidate — claimed that his own exit poll — one private exit poll with no known methodology, no precise results, no known margin-of-error, no known sample size and no polling director we can call up to find out that stuff (campaigns keep internal polling data close to the chest) — showed he was in the lead.

Such claims are, of course, standard operating procedure in a close race, and have nothing in common with the kind of discrepancies we saw in Florida, Ohio or the Ukraine — where multiple independent polls diverged from the official results — which is the central claim of the column. But Palast won’t retract the piece.

The reason I’m putting this up is because I watched the implosion of the voting rights movement here in the spin up to the 04 elections, in which several trusted voices all of the sudden started to act like moles, freaks and otherwise tanked their own reputations by rank stupidity and amateurism. Palast has done some good work, and I look forward to his refutation of Holland’s piece. But if Holland is right, Palast is just making himself look stupid talking about data that both sides had access to in a more updated form, no matter what the conservative candidate’s website may or may not have published with respect to some of that data.

Mexico: All the errors went FOR the conservative, AGAINST Obrador

Sound familiar?

In Mexico, there is a form of recount where voting tally sheets are compared to the actual ballots. It’s like comparing your shipping manifest to what’s actually in the packing case. This form of recount has already been undertaken in some states, When you look at the real votes, what happened? Did the errors favor the conservative?

Surprise! Democracy Now:

JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the official count that did occur in the last — in the midweek, there were instances where some ballot boxes were opened, and generally speaking, the counts, the actual counts, there improved the numbers for Lopez Obrador, didn’t they, for the most part?

LAURA CARLSEN: Yes, that’s exactly right. The ones that were opened, according to these very strict rules that the Federal Elections Institute has for which ones you open or not, they did have mistakes in them. And those mistakes generally did favor Felipe Calderon. This will be one of the — certainly one of the arguments that the group of lawyers of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will put forward when they ask the court to review the matter, because they’re saying that not only there are mistakes, but these mistakes tend to have a tendency to favor the rightwing candidate.

Je repete: Mexico 2006 = Ohio 2004 = Florida 2000. This fight is our fight, because when the wingers win anywhere, we lose everywhere.

NOTE The tallysheet recount does not address many of the other possibilities for election fraud: (1) software theft, which can only be addressed by a full recount, (2) fraudulent voter lists, as in the famous Florida felon list, and (3) the harshness of the campaign itself (some of Dick Morris’s tactics for Calderon may have been illegal under Mexican law).

Mexico: Calling all statisticians

Via the excellent El Machete here’s a link to the first statistical analysis of Mexico 2006:

Stats.

Readers? I’m no statistician—Can anyone assess this information?

Mexico: Is Pony Blow ignorant, or lying?

Via First Draft’s gaggle-obsessed Holden, the lovely, the talented Pony Blow:

Q The call the President Bush made to Calderon to congratulate him, that means that the U.S. government already recognized him as the President-elect of Mexico? Can you explain what —

MR. SNOW: Well, I believe the electoral commission had, in fact, declared him President. And according to the laws of Mexico, at this point, he is President.

Not so. Wrong. As Corrente readers know, the Mexican electoral court, TRIFE, certifies the result, not the electoral commmission. And that won’t happen until September, so Bush’s congratulations are about two months premature.

But Pony Blow forges ahead:

Should there be a recount, should there be another adjustment, should there be a change, then the President Bush will acknowledge that, as well — Mexico, obviously having the ability to decide who, as a result of transparent elections, is the President of the country.

Only in Bush’s America would it be news that the decision of an electoral court would be respected.

So, is Pony Blow ignorant? Lying? Doesn’t give two shits? What?

NOTE The Beeb (thanks CD) reports on this exchange:

On Monday, White House spokesman Tony Snow defended Mr Bush’s decision to call Mr Calderon on Thursday.

Although he did say that if a Mexican court ruling changed who won the election, Mr Bush would respect that.

See what I mean? When Bush respects a court decision, it’s news!

Mexico: More on the Videos

The day after Corrente brought you the actual video, the The Houston Chronicle writes a story:

The videos — one of which shows a man apparently stuffing wads of votes into a ballot box — are part of a strategy by the former Mexico City mayor to overturn the election results.

Meanwhile, the Federal Electoral Institute, which Lopez Obrador says helped steal the elections, launched radio ads to defend its reputation for fairness. The ads say the voting was overseen by 1 million citizens and that all five competing political parties had observers at most of the voting booths.

Lopez Obrador says his Democratic Revolution Party only had observers in 70 percent of the 130,000 polling stations.

I’d say that Obrador makes a good prima facie case with that response. After all, if you were going to steal something, you’d want to do it where you weren’t being watched.

However, it would be interesting to know if the videos came from a station where Obrador’s party didn’t have observers. And it would also be interesting to have a statistical breakdown of the where the irregularities took place. Do they correlate to the places where Obrador didn’t have observers? (The north, perhaps?)

Now, to be fair—and here at The Mighty Corrente Building, “Foily But Fair” has ever been our motto, carved in gold letters round the pediment of the massive dome of the Borges wing in the Library Department—the FEI’s response to the videos (search on “square 2227” here , as prompted by alert reader Julio)—is not directly addressed by the Chronicle article.

Or by any other article in the English press.

So, all we can do is track the events as they unfold, and try to get as much detail as possible.

UPDATE Obrador press conference on where the videos came from. Not all the questions above are answered.

Mexico: Obrador files challenge, and WaPo disgraces itself yet again

Here’s the tail end of Manuel Roig-Franzia Mexican Runner-Up Files Legal Challenge. It’s as fine an example of “balanced,” “he said/she said” stenography as I’ve come across in quite some time:

The challenge will assert, Camacho said, that the brother-in-law, Diego [Hildebrando] Zavala, was hired to develop software to review voter registration. López Obrador’s supporters say the contract created a conflict of interest that could have been used to give Calderón an improper advantage.

In an interview before the election, the head of the electoral commission, Luis Carlos Ugalde, denied contracting with Zavala’s company, known as Hildebrando.

“He denies it,” said the Red King. “Leave out that part.”

During the campaign, Calderón and his brother-in-law vigorously denied wrongdoing.

López Obrador also alleges that the electoral commission preprogrammed its computers before the election to show a Calderón victory. Electoral commission officials on Sunday denied the accusation.

What are the key facts WaPo’s “balanced” coverage leaves out?

1. Hildebrando’s contracts were a matter of public record, so it doesn’t matter whether IFE’s Ugalde denies their existence or not.

2. Hildrebrando’s software has already been hacked.

C’mon guys! Cover the story! I can still remember how the Times covered the “bourgeios riot” in Florida 2000; only after it was all over did they run the story that these guys were Republican operatives, down from DC. Even though they had the video tape showing their faces almost immediately.

C’mon Pravda! You can do better than Izvestia!

Mexico: Obrador filing to challenge election results

The excellent Charles at Mercury Rising summarizes:

Some of the formal elements of the complaint:
1. Partiality of the election institute (IFE) in not stopping the “Swiftboating” ads

2. Manipulation of the preliminary count by IFE

3. IFE failing to mention 2.5 million votes in the preliminary count.

4. Use of patronage, including some heavy-handed pressure on elderly/ill/disabled recipients of social programs including Vivienda Rural and Adultos Mayores.

If I understand aright, 152 complaints have been filed outside of District 15. 151 are directed toward inconsistencies in calculation and precinct “irregularities” like the pregnant urn, which have already brought 52,000 votes into question. For Mexico City, there were “generic irregularities,” presumably polling stations closed by flooding, voters told ballots were waterlogged, and so on. District 15’s results were a litany of irregularities.

The complaint also alleges that the software and computer system were compromised in a manner that would allow tampering. The 904, 604 blank ballots are 116,447 greater than in 2000 and are 2.16% of the total. In certain unmonitored districts, there are suspicious statistics for the Nueva Alianza candidate.

And, says Charles, they’ve got videos.

A guy in blue dumping ballots into an urn. Maybe we can track that sucker down…

Mexico: Obrador says more videos on the way

Kossack Litho translated Obdrador’s latest press conference. Here are some excerpts:

Where did the video of “Blue Shirt Guy” stuffing the ballot box come from? Citizen journalists and whistleblowers:

Q: Who shot these images, did your people take them?
[OBRADOR] The people are sending us, thank you for asking that question, people are sending us information. I call on all free citizens, those who want democracy in Mexico, to continue sending us proofs such as these. In the two cases, they were citizens who sent them to us. In the first case it was a filming done of several polling places and they got this image. In the second case it was inside the Federal District Committee or Council.

Will there be more?

Q: Do you have more videos?
A: Yes, many more will be coming, I am sure, but I don’t know if they will continue sending videos, but yes we have started and we have just started.

Q: Inaudible.
A: I’m sorry?

Q: Inaudible.
A: We have other proofs, they will continue coming.

Freedom is so untidy…

Mexico: Obrador's guys trap IFE in building as they seek to open sealed ballots and truck them away

[Via extremely alert reader Charles.]

I’m sure there’s a very good explanation…

Here’s a Google translation of the La Jornada story:

On the other hand, in Villahermosa, Tabasco, about 500 militant PRD members maintained tonight retained to ten assistants of Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) in the third district with seat in the municipality of Comalcalco at least.

According to the denunciation of the PRD member Javier May Rodriguez, the retained ones were surprised when they entered the offices of that district to open the electoral packages and to remove documentation, after breaking official seals.

Around the 18 hours, neighbors of the place warned the PRD [Obrador’s party] members who a group of people had introduced itself to the offices of the organ and removed to the patio electoral packages to open them. They affirmed that he was observed reviewing scrutiny acts to them and counting votes.

In addition, he has himself in front of retained a light truck - with logotipo of the BREAD [another acronym for PAN, Calderon’s party] parked the building, in which he is created would take the electoral documentation.

May Rodriguez said that she faced the electoral civil employees and she asked to them who had issued the order to violate seals of the premises and to open the packages.

The electoral assistants argued that the president of the distrital advice, Castilian Takings Alfonso, instructed them to enter the offices and for that reason the military who protect the premises allowed the entrance them. He mentioned that before these facts one communicated to Villahemosa, with the local advisor of the IFE, Aída Castillo, that said to him that he was ” surprised ” reason why it happened. He narrated that they came to speak to a notary so that gave faith of the facts.

Tonight a group of leaders of the PRD went to the offices of the Office of the public prosecutor Specialized for the Attention of Electoral Crimes in Villahermosa, to interpose the denunciation. To Comalcalco - where to the closing of this edition they remained retained the electoral civil employees arrived the senator PRD member Caesar Raul Ojeda.

Charles’s summary of the original above:

In Villahermosa, Tabasco, the PRD was tipped that people had broken the official seals with the intent of altering documents, and were allowed in the IFE offices by the obliging military guards; a PAN truck was parked out in front. It turned out these were local IFE personnel, who argued that the district president Tomás Alfonso Castellanos [note to self: check if TAC is a local cacique] had ordered them to do this. 500 PRDists converged on the offices, made a citizen’s arrest (I think) and are presently holding the IFE personnel. The local IFE rep in Villahermosa said he was “surprised” by this report.

Remember Ohio 2004 in Warren County, when the Republicans sealed off the building where the votes were being counted, because of a terror alert that the FBI said was fake?

In Villahermosa, that’s not happening.

Good for Mexico, good for the Mexican people, good for justice.

Mexico: Obrador's site hacked when vote fixing calls played?

This is interesting. Prensa Latina (although the English is a little rough). Not to get, erm, foily, but:

The spread by the media of information dealing with a fifth attack on the website of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, candidate of the For the Good of All coalition.

And was Obrador’s site hacked on general principles, or for more specific reasons? Well….

The intromission came Saturday evening hours after Lopez Obrador outlined and made a call to join a national plan to fight electoral fraud at a mass rally in this capital´s main square.

The attack occurred when the website began to broadcast phone conversations showing maneuvers to favor the win of pro-government Felipe Calderon.

Those calls are included in the impugnation file.

Hmmm….

Of course, the site might have gone down when it was overwhelmed with downloads of the phone converations.

Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

NOTE Still looking for a Spanish translator…

UPDATE An aside on hacking from El Machete.

Mexico: Palast reports from Mexico City

Here.

I’d say there’s nothing here that alert Corrente readers haven’t seen, but it’s early days yet.

Re: ChoicePoint. He’s pushing it hard, but the idea is that the ChoicePoint database contains a lot of personal information, and that was used to intimidate. So ChoicePoint wouldn’t have been used for the voter rolls. This strikes me as at least plausible.

Mexico: Pravda on the Potomac disgraces itself

So, who does Pravda on the Potomac hire to write an Op-Ed full of sage advice to Calderon and Obrador? Who is their Go-To Guy? Drumroll, please:

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a partner at Patton Boggs, [who] served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaigns in [Florida] 2000 and [Ohio] 2004.

Somehow, I have the feeling WaPo is sending a very strong signal about the direction their coverage of the Mexican election is going to take.

Ginsberg concludes, after mentioning “wily political operatives” twice:

Don’t overreact, just debunk the allegations as best you can. Trust me, especially if you win, the bleating will continue long after the country has moved on. Don’t worry about it.

Fuck you too, mailto:bginsberg@pattonboggs.com.

NOTE Funny how, in his catalog of helpful advice, lawyer Ginsberg fails to mention the Florida felons list, ChoicePoint, the bourgeois riot, Diebold, or the hours spent waiting in line by Democratic (but not Republican) voters in Ohio.

Mexico: Pravda on the Potomac is on the case!

Charles at Mercury Rising leaves ’em whimpering. After praising WaPo what they covered accurately—and it’s great that WaPo actually has a reporter on the ground in Mexico City—he tears Manuel Roig-Renza several new ones. It’s so fun to watch I’m going to quote a lot of it:

Let’s start from a little meta analysis, introducing the cast of character puppets the WaPo parades forth for its Punch and Judy show:

There is The Mob. They are poor, filled with “frustration and rage.” They wave signs, They pump their fists. They suffer “decades of perceived indignities and a sense of persecution,” (emphasis added) rather than, say, decades of real indignities and persecution like being forced off their ancestral lands, shot, beaten, and raped, and having elections stolen. They are clearly insane and dangerous.

There is Lopez Obrador: He is a “failed populist candidate,” i.e., the WaPo is telling us that his allegations of electoral fraud are bogus. He “ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers,” making him a dangerous incendiary.

There is FeCal: A “champion of free trade,” i.e. the White Knight.

There is Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute, FeCal’s charger, “which has a stellar international reputation,” assuming you only ask right-wingers.

If you’re getting the sense that you’ve seen children’s cartoons with more convincingly constructed characters, you’re right.

Let’s now enumerate the outright lies and pickaninny-grade caricatures.

1. “On Saturday, he gave a mega-display of street power….” The point of the demo was not to show “street power.” That comes next week. The point was to speak directly to his supporters, many of whom may not get their news from newspapers or from the Murdochized TV. As he “communication is difficult” since the Mexican electronic media is as bad as the US. The streets are their blogs.

2. “The crowd chanted, ’Strong, strong!’ when López Obrador stepped to the microphone.” This is probably a mistranslation of “Fuerte! Fuerte!” or “Loud! Loud!,” a not unreasonable request from a large crowd. Or perhaps the WaPo misheard the cried of “Fraude! Fraude!” (Fraud! Fraud!) that the McClatchy man heard.

3. “He got a moment of mass catharsis, an outrageously loud, communal venting.” As Atrios would say, “Oy.” Half a million people think they are living under a dictatorship and it’s “venting.”

4. One of the more amusing gaffes in this article involves residual editor’s marks: “x ’They stole this from us,’ said Concepción Myen, 68, a lifelong Mexico City resident who is unemployed. ’This is the worst thing that can happen to Mexico.’x” In conventional editing, xes are used for typeface blemishes. Since this is the WaPo, I would imagine those xes are probably editor’s thoughtcrime marks.

5. But it gets funnier, in a sick sort of way. Why is Concepcion Myen unemployed? Well, if you noticed, she is 68. Even in Mexico, people are expected to be able to retire at some point. But in Punch and Judy world, they have to be slugabeds to be members of the angry Mob.

6. “Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, lost a presidential race that many international observers have said was stolen” If the election was stolen, it wasn’t lost. The WaPo is trying to imply that those international observers are wrong. They weren’t

7. Lopez Obrador stated that there is no president-elect, since the election is disputed. But the WaPo calls Calderon’s claiming to be president elect and receiving phone calls from Bush and Stephen “Bush North” Harper “formalities.” They shoulda listened to the Elections Court. Judge Eloy Fuentes said that no disputed election in non-annulable. “We rule on the validity [of the election]” he said, in a clear slap at the the head of the election institute, Ugalde.

Beautiful. A classic example of narrative trumps story. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And, just a coincidence, mind you, so helpful to the right in so many ways.

Mexico: The opera ain't over until TRIFE sings

Via Mex Files, Joshua Holland has an excellent overview of the Mexican electoral process—so much more informative and temperate than our press. What a breath of fresh air. Here’s what Joshua has to say:

That narrative is wrong for one simple reason: nobody has won Mexico’s presidential election. Regardless of what the New York Times or Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) claim, the results aren’t in. Under Mexican law, only the Federal Electoral Tribunal, know by its Spanish acronym TRIFE, can say who will serve as Mexico’s next president.

Amazing, or not, that Bush congratulated Calderon, isn’t it? (It’s also odd, or not, that Calderon didn’t set Bush straight.)

Now, about TRIFE:

As Robert Parsons, an expert on elections at American University, points out, Mexico’s electoral institutions — considered among the best in the world — have gotten far ahead of its political culture. Most Mexicans expect attempts to game the system after almost a century of hijacked votes. Mexico’s complex election laws and multilayered electoral institutions are designed not only to prevent fraud, but to detect and reverse it.

That’s my takeaway from this whole saga, no matter who wins:

Our election systems SUCK, compared to Mexico’s. Amazing. Or not.

At the end of that road is the TRIFE. The TRIFE’s seven magistrates — nominated by the Supreme Court and confirmed by a two-thirds majority in the Senate — are respected legal scholars who serve long terms and are relatively insulated from outside pressure. Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian who supports López Obrador, told the Associated Press: “The magistrates are serious people. They come from academic and legal backgrounds. I can’t imagine them distorting their decision because of pressure from a party.”

López Obrador’s PRD, which is somewhat of an “outsider” party, has accused the vaunted IFE of “bias” in its decisions, but Manuel Camacho, a top campaign aide to AMLO, told the AP that “the PRD [Obrador’s party] has confidence in the TRIFE.”

López Obrador and his supporters claim there were irregularities at 40,000 of the country’s 130,000 polling places. Calderón got a razor-thin margin in last Wednesday’s official tally of the actas — the summary sheets prepared at each polling place (the actual ballots were only counted when there was a discrepancy with the actas) — of less than 250,000 votes out of over 41 million votes cast. López Obrador has called for a complete ballot-by-ballot recount.

This week, the PRD will submit official complaints to the TRIFE, which has the authority to give AMLO his recount, overturn the results in any of Mexico’s 30 states and even annul the whole enchilada nationwide and order a new vote (an unlikely scenario). The magistrates will evaluate and rule on each claim before making a final decision on a winner. The process is expected to drag on for weeks; the TRIFE has until August 31 to complete its deliberations and isn’t required to make a final judgment until the first week of September.

Although the TRIFE magistrates come from a judiciary dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that controlled Mexican government for generations, TRIFE has made decisions in the past that have gone against both PRI and PAN. The tribunal threw out PRI’s victory in the 2000 Tabasco state governor’s race because of official interference and ordered a new vote.

Let’s hope, for the sake of all the Mexican people, that their electoral institutions are strong. Stronger than our own, so mercilessly revealed to be farcically weak in Bush v. Gore.

Mexico: Times, Financial Times agree with Obrador--"Count all the votes!"

The Times, where a glimmer of sense occasionally penetrates the editorial page, if not the “news hole”:

The Western world has had quite a bit of experience with near-ties in recent years. … But there are enough problems to warrant a complete recount. Some polling stations that have recounted their ballots have found that the votes were misrecorded on tally sheets. The earlier discrepancies appeared to largely favor Mr. Calderón, in at least one case mistakenly awarding him hundreds of extra votes. The I.F.E. cannot legally order a recount of the entire presidential election. But the Federal Election Tribunal, an independent panel created to handle these kinds of disputes, could. In previous races, it has even gone so far as to call new elections in the states of Tabasco and Colima.

And the Financial Times:

[T]he result - victory by a narrow margin for Felipe Calderón of the governing centre-right National Action party - has left millions of Mexicans with more than a bitter taste. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leading leftwing challenger, is alleging foul play and demanding a full recount of the votes. That is exactly what Mexico’s electoral authorities should do.

Nevertheless, a full recount would help Mexico through this crisis in several ways. First, if properly and fairly conducted it would resolve once and for all who won the election and would send a clear message to suspicious minds that Mexico is a transparent democracy.

We could use some of that “transparency” here.

Second, if it confirms his triumph a recount would help Mr Calderón govern more effectively. Mr Calderón is promising to seek national reconciliation but this will be difficult to achieve if substantial numbers of poorer Mexicans view him as an illegitimate leader.

Sound familiar? Remember “a uniter not a divider”? After Bush v Gore that was never going to possible for Bush, even if he wasn’t a wholly owned subsidiary of the Christianists.

Last week, Mr Calderón told the Financial Times that he was in favour of a recount in principle but worried that opening all the ballot boxes would flout the country’s laws, thus providing the opposition with an excuse to argue that the entire election should be declared null and void. The electoral authorities should take whatever steps are necessary to provide him with the guarantees to enable a full recount without jeopardising the election itself. The decision could provide some short-term drawbacks - not least more weeks of uncertainty. But the long-term benefits would be far more important.

Mr. Calderon, open those ballot boxes!

Mexico: Video of Blue-Shirt-Guy stuffing a ballot box

[UPDATE Too big for YouTube. Working on that. Anyone know of some FREE video editing software on Mac OS X that will work on *.wmv files?]

[UPDATE 2 Thanks to Sean Paul, who hosted the video that YouTube wouldn’t.]

[UDPATE 3 IFE has responded to the video. See the comments below.]

Hold it! Smile!

Click on the picture to see the video:

Watch for “Blue Shirt Guy” at 1:10. Here’s what he looks like:

Now, to be fair—and at The Mighty Corrente Building we are always so fair that a Department of Fairness isn’t even needed—the provenance of this video is not known.

We got the link from the most excellent Charles and downloaded it from the Obrador site, and they got it from … A video-literate mole in the Calderon campaign?

However, I believe, though I’m not sure (not being a Spanish reader) that videos like this are part of the Obrador filing.

Mexico: Why Mexico's electoral system is stronger than ours

I’m not fully caffeinated yet, so I’ll content myself with some commentary. (The energetic Charles at Mercury Rising has the latest news. Calderon’s flip-flopping on recounts again.)

In every way, the Mexican electoral system has proven itself more robust than our own:

1. The guy with the most votes wins. Imagine that!

2. The system is designed to deter, detect, and reverse fraud. Imagine that!

3. The citizens act to preserve the system’s strength.

They took videos at the polling places. They trapped operatives who were opening ballot boxes inside a building, held them, and took the story national.

4. Obrador’s Party (the PRD) is stronger than the Dems.

Suppose, just suppose, that an American citizen had shot a video of what went on inside the sealed Warren County operation in Ohio 2004, and brought that to the Democratic Party.

What are the odds that the Dems would have published it? I’d say very low. But the PRD stood up. Obrador didn’t collect money from his own activists for court filings and then sit on it.

What are the odds the press would have published it? I’d say zero. Remeber how the Times didn’t run the story on the Miami bourgeois riots until after Bush v Gore? Even though they had the video beforehand, and any Washington reporter would have recognized all the staffers and operatives doing the rioting by sight?

Finally, and above all:

5. THE MEXICAN ELECTORAL SYSTEM LEAVES A PAPER TRAIL.

And it’s the logistics of hijacking an election with physical ballots, physical ballot boxes in an electronic age that’s keeping the system strong.

You can video a man stuffing a physical ballot box. And that’s a story everyone can understand. And it makes the national news.

You can trap guys in a building when they’re trying to steal physical ballots. That’s a story too. And it makes the national news.

In America, with our hackable, very expensive, and Republican owned and operated e-voting systems, we have none of that protection.

All it takes to steal a close election—and Rove always operates at the margin, remember—is a few bits and bytes shifted in a quiet cubicle somewhere.

And that may be the most insidious aspect of the electronic voting technology the Republicans are forcing on us. Without the physical act of counting the physical votes, there’s no narrative.

[Rather, there’s only the lazy narrative the stenographers already know.]

And without physical ballot stuffing, or physical ballot theft, there’s no story.

No story at all. No bad guys caught in the act.

Just a little data shifted in a quiet cube.

Yes indeed, Mexico 2006 = Ohio 2004 = Flodida 2000. Mexico’s fight for justice is America’s fight for justice.

But thanks to the strengths of their electoral system, justice has a better chance in Mexico than in America.

Sad. But hopeful, because we can learn from them.

Obrador: Count all the votes

A nice, sharp message. [But see UPDATE, below.] Unlike Florida 2000. And at least in Mexico 2006, they don’t have Ho Lieberman going on TV conceding votes to the Republicans—while not insisting that all the votes be counted! Obrador:

Lopez Obrador claims a manual recount would confirm that hundreds of thousands of votes for him remain uncounted, miscounted or voided. The law allows such a recount only for specific polling places where credible evidence of irregularities exist. The leftist’s supporters say that applies to at least 50,000 of the approximately 130,000 polling places.

50,000, eh?

Well, we know of at least two. the votes found in the trash dump (thanks for the translation, CD) and this little paragraph from the World’s Greatest Newspaper (not!). Way, way down in the story, at paragraph 26:

Juan Huerta, 55, who works at a newsstand near a luxury department store, said he thought that the election was riddled with fraud. Mr. Huerta said he tried to cast a ballot for Mr. López Obrador, but was told that rain had soaked all the ballots. “This is a fraud against the people,” he said.

“Rain had soaked all the ballots”… I love it!

What I can’t understand is why Obrador’s opponent, Calderon, doesn’t want all the ballots counted, too. After all, what could legitimize him more than a fair count?

NOTE What a slap in the face of Democracy for Bush to call with Calderon with a congratulatory message. The Mexican election isn’t officialy over until the results are certified, and that hasn’t happened yet. Nor has Obrador conceded.

Could it be that Bush feels his own legitimacy is called into question if Obrador’s charges of fraud get an open hearing?

UPDATE Ack, I’m wrong. This is what comes from not being able to read Spanish (CD, help!) NarcoNews:

López Obrador’s campaign is, in fact, seeking a recount of only those precincts where it found indications of fraud: a lot of them: 43,000, more or less. This extrapolation – if those precincts are counted vote-by-vote – would give his candidacy a victory of 243,000 votes.

This concerns me. It’s the exact same strategy that Gore followed in Florida, challenging only in certain precincts. That failed, and when it did, there was no basis to challenge the entire vote (which would have given Gore the victory). I hope history doesn’t repeat itself here.

Obrador: Count all the votes

Sound familiar? What could the problem with counting the votes possibly be? Even if the wingers have already declared victory, and their cry has been taken up by the press. Hmmm… LA Times:

[Lopez Obrador’s] PRD officials say they have ample evidence of irregularities. In many instances, they said, vote totals at precincts in Calderon strongholds, such as the central state of Guanajuato, exceeded the number of ballots delivered to those precincts.

The election was monitored by hundreds of international observers, many of whom lauded the apparent orderliness of Sunday’s vote. Some, however, did note irregularities during the official count of polling station reports that began Wednesday.

The tribunal has until September to validate the results of the election. Until it does, Calderon’s victory has no legal standing.

Even so, Calderon received congratulations from several world leaders.

Maybe Mexican democracy will turn out to be healthie than ours…

Then again, ChoicePoint did do their voter rolls, so maybe they’re already ratfucked. Or rat-hacked, as the case may be.