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.