Here’s what they’re pissed about: The numbers in July’s election just don’t add up. So the suspicion of election fraud is natural—just as natural as in Florida 2000, where, because the the felon’s list, the suspicions proved out, or Ohio 2004, still under dispute (although the Republicans have been prevented from destroying the physical ballots).

In Mexico, the simple solution—and one that would have completely legitimized the victor—would have been to re-count all the votes. Especially since the margin was tiny: 0.0%. (Sound familiar?) But the Mexican electoral court refused to do that. Setting the stage for… What? Well, we know it won’t be pretty. And we know the SCLM either won’t cover it, or will phone in the usual narratives (“crazy leftists”).

So, here’s a look at the numbers from James K. Galbraith in the Guardian. (I’ve had this one on my FF “Home” tabs for weeks, but with $450 million slush fund to the North, and stolen elections to the South, it’s really starting to look like a Republican continent, isn’t it? There are so very many huge, unheard of stories to cover.)

In Mexico, it is extremely easy [to learn what the evidence of fraud is]. That is because the Mexican electoral authority, known as IFE, posted the ongoing count on its website in real time, an initiative called PREP. [A major contrast to our exit polls.] Independent scholars kept a record of PREP as the night progressed. A statistical analysis of that record does not, of course, constitute proof. But it brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s remark that circumstantial evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Oh, and Obrador (“AMLO,” from his initials) is the leftist; Calderon (the putative winner—though nothing is official until September 6, when the electoral court declares the winner—is the winger.

To begin with, the totals don’t add up:

According to an article by Roberto González Amador in La Jornada, the vote totals don’t match the percentages reported. Given the just over 15m votes Calderón was said to have earned, the percentage reported for him, 35.89%, could only be obtained by including invalid ballots in the total reported. If, on the other hand, one takes the overall vote total and the percentage reported for Calderón as correct, then his total vote must have been substantially less than was reported.

The same is true for AMLO and the other candidates, and there is a total shortfall of over a million votes between what can be justified by the official percentages of the valid votes, and the sum of votes reported. The discrepancy proves nothing, but even if it is only a simple error, it certainly seems to cast doubt over the competence of the count.

A million here, a million there, but who’s counting?

That’s the macro number. A 1,000,000 (one million) vote discrepancy. Now for the micro numbers, where the statisticians get down and dirty. (This is abridged; the full post will repay study.)

An analysis by the physicist Luis Mochán of UNAM based on the realtime evolution of the vote count [as the ballot boxes were counted] and the distribution of vote totals by polling place can be found here, and in greater detail in Spanish, here.

Mochán’s work calls attention to at least four important anomalies in the count.

1. Calderón’s percentage lead in the count started at around seven percentage points, and diminished steadily in percentage terms through the first part of the count. This corresponded to a remarkably constant absolute differential between Calderón and AMLO as the count progressed. Is this normal? The count depended on the arrival of the [ballot] boxes [for our Canadian readers, les tabernacs]; if this were absolutely random then the proportions should have held roughly constant while absolute differentials widened, as actually happened to the differential between Calderón and the third major candidate, Madrazo of the PRI, for most of the evening. Why did the Calderón-AMLO differential follow a different rule?

In the Vulgate: Calderon was always ahead by (say) 100,000, no matter how many votes were counted. Wierd. Certainly not random.

2. The PREP results went on view only after the first 10,000 boxes had been processed. If those first 10,000 boxes resembled what came later, then extrapolating backward should produce a line intersecting the origin - each candidate should have started with zero votes. For Calderón this is the case, but for AMLO it is not: the AMLO intercept is actually at minus 126,000 votes. Thus, the first 10,000 boxes were markedly different from those that followed. How?

In the vulgate: The AMLO boxes could have been, as it were, “unstuffed” by 126,000.

3. There are gross anomalies in the number of votes counted per five-minute interval as the count finishes. Over the course of the evening, the pattern of vote counts set a normal range for this variable. As the last boxes came in, however, it was radically violated, with many more votes piled in, per interval, than was normal before. Moreover, toward the very end, PREP reset the box count, which regressed from 127,936 at 13.17 on July 3 to 127,713 at 13.50, meaning that records for 223 boxes disappeared. 33 minutes had by then passed with no updates. When they resumed, there were updates with absurd results: more than 6000 votes per box at 13:57, and then updates with large negative votes per box at 13:57 and 14:03.

In the vulgate: When the stage machinery breaks down, you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes.

4. From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is. But for Calderón and AMLO it isn’t. In Calderón’s case, the distribution appears to be shifted out, with the shift localized among the last 40,000 boxes counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution tails off abruptly from its peak. It is in the difference between the slightly fat distribution for Calderón and the shaved distribution for AMLO that the difference in the final outcome is to be found. A graph of the differences in Calderón and AMLO’s votes per box, which ought to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a certain range, Calderón’s margins appear abnormally large.

In the vulgate: Ballot boxes were stuffed for Calderon.

[Professor Mochán] concludes that it “is reasonable to suspect that there could have been a manipulation of the results reported by the PREP.” But PREP reported the box-by-box results as they flowed in-and as such it constitutes a vital instrument for the detection of patterns of manipulation and fraud.

So, again, the reasonable thing to do would have been to open all the boxes and count all the votes. Which is a win-win for everybody, since the result be seen as legitimate. But for some reason, the electoral court did not do this.

Galbraith conludes:

Is it time to move on? The numbers suggest otherwise. By demonstrating the possibility of detecting fraud before the results of an election are officially decided, they also inaugurate a new phase in the struggle for the recognition of a democratic vote. The Mexican people, who marched through their capital today, appear determined to carry that struggle forward until justice is won. Unlike the so-called Democratic Party in the United States six years back, Andres Manuel López Obrador appears, for now, determined not to compromise with fraud.

And for those of us outside Mexico, we must decide where we stand: with democracy … or quietly on the sidelines?

Their fight is our fight.

UPDATE Coverage of the growing crisis:

CNN:

ndres Manuel Lopez Obrador, convinced he won’t be awarded the presidency, has vowed to create a parallel leftist government and is urging Mexicans not to recognize the apparent victory of the ruling party’s Felipe Calderon.

“We do not recognize Felipe Calderon as president, nor any officials he appoints, nor any acts carried out by his de-facto government,” Lopez Obrador said after the court ruling, which he claims overlooked evidence of fraud in the July 2 elections.

People close to Lopez Obrador say he is assuming the role of his hero, 18th-century President Benito Juarez, who led a roving, “unofficial” presidency from 1863 to 1867 during the French invasion, before driving out the invaders and executing the French-installed Emperor Maximilian.

LA Times:

[Obrador] harnessed the full support of his party’s congressional delegation to block Fox from delivering his nationally televised State of the Nation speech Friday, humiliating the president and raising fears over his apparent inability to exercise authority against a growing opposition.

“The question becomes, is Mexico on the brink of political crisis? And you could say after Friday that it’s entered that realm,” said Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, a Mexico expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There doesn’t seem to be a willingness to negotiate or compromise…. It’s like two trains on a head-on collision course.”

“Granted, [Obrador] exposed Mexico’s Achilles’ heel — that the have-nots haven’t benefited to the extent that others have. But I just don’t know whether it justifies unraveling Mexico’s political system as a result,” Peschard-Sverdrup said.

Unlike this country, where there is a Constitutional crisis, but not a political one.

SF Chronicle:

“This movement will not be about violence and setting up blockades,” said Rafael Rodriguez, national coordinator of Mexico’s National Farmer Trade Association, which represents 60,000 small-scale farmers. “Our struggle will be concentrated on specific reforms and ideas, with a dominant part of the agenda set on how to rescue the countryside.”

Rodriguez refers to Lopez Obrador’s promise to rework the NAFTA treaty to protect corn and bean crops, the mainstay of these struggling farmers. Under the U.S.-Mexican-Canadian pact, import tariffs will be lifted in 2008, leaving numerous farmers here unable to compete with subsidized U.S. growers.

“This will be a peaceful resistance movement, more Martin Luther King Jr. than Che Guevara,” said Jose Agustin Ortiz, a former PRD federal congressman and one of the project’s national coordinators. “We’re more center-left. I don’t see us attracting radical leftist groups.”

Hmmm… I’m not seeing a lot of people being benefitted by NAFTA. Not to the North, not to the South, and not here. Here too, their fight is our fight.

UPDATE A second key date is September 16:

López Obrador has said he will never recognize a victory by Calderón — candidate of Fox’s party — and says he will declare himself the alternative president. López Obrador has called supporters to a mass meeting to plot strategy on Sept. 16 in Mexico City’s central plaza —the same day and place the Army stages an annual Independence Day parade.

Um. Yikes.

UPDATE From the Center for Economic and Policy Research via Kossack El Cid:

Although the recount was completed nearly three weeks ago, the TEPJF has refused to release the numbers showing how the candidates’ vote totals were changed by the recount. This contrasts sharply to the procedure followed for the preliminary and second vote tallies in July, when the results were made public immediately.

“This certainly casts doubt on the electoral authorities’ decision to reject a full recount,” said [CEPR’s] Weisbrot. “And it makes the TEPJF’s decision not to release the recounted vote totals look even worse.”*

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has found a significant loss of votes for PAN presidential candidate Felipe Calderón in a sample of recounted ballots.

Adding up the numbers for 1,706 ballot boxes (casillas) shows a loss of 1,362 votes for Felipe Calderón. Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PBT shows a gain of 77 votes.

“This is inexplicably one-sided, with Calderón losing votes but López Obrador not losing any,” said CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot. “It is also a significant percentage of votes in an election this close.”

The 1,362 votes lost by Calderón represent 0.54 percent of his votes in these ballot boxes.

The result for the whole group of recounted ballot boxes would likely show a similar percentage.

In the vulgate: What’s inexplicable about it?