Is it a good idea for election officials at a polling station to ignore demands for a recount when their own results list more votes than voters? Mexico's electoral court apparently thinks not. Over the weekend, Mexico's highest Electoral Tribunal
ordered a partial recount in just over 9% (11,839) of the nation's 130,477 polling stations, to begin this Wednesday (9 Aug) and concluding next Monday (14 Aug).
Liberal candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whom the current count holds as trailing conservative candidate Felipe Calderon by 0.58% of votes, has vowed to keep up the campaign of "civil resistance" until a full recount is somehow authorized. In recent weeks millions of demonstrators have marched in downtown Mexico City and since last Sunday (01 Aug) has included thousands of protesters camped out in the downtown, blocking some major thoroughfares.
As explained in the following {translated} article from El Universal, the judges of the Tribunal felt that much of this could have been avoided had polling station supervisors simply recounted whenever there were OBVIOUS mathematical errors.
For some coverage in English check out the Miami-based
English-language section of Mexico News from Mexico's El Universal.
My quick reaction is twofold:
First, my suspicions are strongly that without the marches and demonstrations, even the Electoral Tribunal may not have taken the recount claims of the liberal coalition seriously. (They might have, I don't know, that's just my suspicion.)
Second, no one, whether a citizen or a candidate or a political party, should have to BEG or SUE to get election officials to recount paper ballots when the number of votes in a polling station exceed the number of voters.
If you want to make people suspicious of their electoral authorities, then just refuse to check your work when your results seem obviously wrong.
Electoral Tribunal Questions How Evident Errors Ignored
Carlos Avilés Allende
El Universal
Monday, 7 August 2006
Ruling emphasizes that in most polling stations the number of votes exceeded the number of voters
The Electoral Tribunal reproached the district councils of the IFE in 26 states throughout the country for not having permitted the recount of votes for most of the 11,839 polling stations ("casillas") that the Tribunal ordered reinspected, since the great majority of these failed to coincide the number of citizens who voted with the nominal list, with the ballots deposited in the boxes and the total vote in each one of these.
This situation led to the result that in an indeterminate number of casillas ordered recounted, the registered voting was greater than the number of citizens who came to vote in those same stations.
Such detected errors in the listed voting records "at first glance" was sufficient motivation for the district councils of IFE to have ordered a recount, based on the reason that to this end was established a law of matters in case of "evident errors", as clarified in the words of the Tribunal.
In these polling stations, a simple mathematical operation would have been sufficient, at the moment of the election count, for the district councils of IFE to have carried out the vote recount, even without the need for the Por el Bien de Todos coalition to have challenged them, according to the Electoral Tribunal...
...For example: in District Council 15 of Jalisco, 55 of 170 polling stations which are to be reinvestigated registered a number of votes which exceeded that of voters who came to vote.
In those 55 polling stations, the difference could be from 1 to 10 votes, but also there are cases like that of polling station #236 in which 130 voters were registered as having yielded 223 votes...
...However, according to the tribunal, such evident errors were not taken into account by the IFE district councils, despite the fact that they are covered by the Federal Code of Electoral Institutions and Procedures as a legal cause to carry out a recount of votes.