Our sympathies to the Mexican people. We in this country have been learning what it’s like to live under an illegitimate government that took power through fraud. It’s painful.

AP:

Felipe Calderon became president-elect of Mexico on Tuesday, two months after disputed elections, when the nation’s top electoral court voted unanimously to reject allegations of fraud and certify his narrow victory.

The court found no evidence of systematic fraud, although it threw out some polling place results for mathematical errors, irregularities, and other problems that trimmed Calderon’s 240,000-vote advantage to 233,831 votes out of 41.6 million cast.

7,000, eh?

If the electoral court wanted to make Calderon’s “election” legitimate, they would have ordered all the votes to be recounted.

For whatever reason, they didn’t. They only recounted 9%.

See here for why the accusations of vote fraud in the Mexican election are credible. One example among many:

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.

How odd. A sudden, mysterious, and unexplained lack of transparency. Anyone else reminded of Warren County, Ohio 2004?

Meanwhile, Obrador seems to be finding more creative ways to “get over it” than we did:  Read more 

Check the utterly essential Charles for continuing coverage of Mexico’s attempt to remain a democracy, and their home-grown winger’s resistance to it. For example:  Read more 

[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.  Read more 

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:  Read more 

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?  Read more 

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.  Read more 

[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:

 Read more 

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

Stats.  Read more 

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  Read more 

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….  Read more 

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:  Read more 

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?  Read more 

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.  Read more 

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?  Read more 

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:  Read more