Nailbiter
The Mexican presidential election "recount" continues to seesaw back and forth with Calderon now a bit ahead according to the Washington Post.
MEXICO CITY, July 5 — The tightest presidential race in Mexican history continued to see-saw back and forth overnight, with populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador edging ahead slightly in a ballot recount early Thursday before slipping back behind ruling-party candidate Felipe Calderón.
With nearly 98 percent of the vote tallies recounted, Calderón had 35.62 percent of the vote, while López Obrador had 35.57 percent, the Associated Press reported just after 5:30 a.m.
The recount at this point (according to Mark In Mexico) is really a recount of the tallies from each polling place, not a physical hand-over-hand through each and every ballot. I rather suspect that this will continue to be very messy for a while.
Each campaign accused the other of trying to manipulate the vote counts to favor their candidate, while electoral officials implored them to refrain from declaring victory until the full count was complete, the Associated Press reported.
Luis Carlos Ugalde, head of the Federal Electoral Institute, which is tabulating the results, said Wednesday that he was unsure how long the count would take. The process is complicated by a law that allows for the contents of the vote packets to be opened only if the tally sheets, or the packages, appear to have been tampered with or damaged. Such packets are then sliced open and a vote-by-vote count is conducted.
This has enraged López Obrador and his supporters, who have alleged that 51,900 polling places had "grave inconsistencies" and that 18,600 ended up with more votes than the number of ballots given to the polling place. They want a vote-by-vote count of every packet. But Ugalde said Wednesday that opening all the packets would amount to a violation of law that would annul the results of not only the presidential race but also thousands of other races, including contests for the legislature and a host of governorships.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Mark In Mexico has his latest update posted and it does show Calderon in the lead by less than 1/2 of one percent. He has a detailed writeup of the process that is going on. It is not a recount.
UPDATE: Uh oh. López Obrador has called his supporters to gather in Mexico City to protest this weekend.
Politics, World news | Gaius July 6, 2006
