Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman interviewed Mark Weisbrot today, whose group the
Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that there are very troublesome problems detected in Mexico's large partial recount of the 2006 presidential elections:
MARK WEISBROT: ...we've analyzed the data. For example, the Lopez Obrador campaign has claimed that in the majority, the vast majority of the ballot boxes, the ballots were not really kept track of. So each ballot box gets a certain amount of ballots [and] the total votes plus the leftover blanks are supposed to add up to the ballots that you got at the beginning of the election. And that didn't add up for the majority of the ballot boxes. So right there, and we verified that by just analyzing the data that's available...that's why it's so strange for the President of the country to say that it's extremist or to even declare that there's a winner, when...more than half of the ballot boxes don't add up. And that by itself is enough of a reason to have a full recount, even aside from all the other irregularities, and there's quite a few.
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watch the video of the segment (RealVideo).
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Here's a bit more of the transcript:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And these massive demonstrations that have been occurring now in Mexico City for weeks, they have gotten very little coverage here in the United States. I'm thinking back to when the massive protests in the Ukraine and some of the other Russian republics over allegations of election fraud. But there hasn't been much coverage here in the U.S. press of these protests right with our southern neighbor.
MARK WEISBROT: No. Not very much. And especially the allegations, like the one I just said before. That's not even allegation. That's a verifiable fact, that you have the majority of ballot boxes where the votes don't add up, the ballots aren't kept track of. So that hasn't -- the media hasn't made an issue out of that. And they haven't made any issue out of the fact that the tribunal is withholding the results. And I'm actually worried that they're going to not even wait until the August 31 deadline. They're going to announce the result before the public gets to see what happened in the two recounts that they already did.
AMY GOODMAN: What does this mean for the future of Mexico?
MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think it's huge. I mean, the issues in this election are very big. Mexico has had a terrible economic failure over the last 25 years. The total economic growth has been about 17% per capita over a 25-year period, as opposed to 99% from 1960 to 1980. And it's been a terrible failure, a terrible economic failure.
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds, unfortunately.
MARK WEISBROT: So this is really -- there's two competing candidates with two competing visions of economic policy and what they're going do for poor people in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you think Lopez Obrador will ever concede? Do you think he could be declared the victor?
MARK WEISBROT: It's possible. It depends again on if there's public pressure to do a full recount or to nullify the results of the election. I don't think they would have even gotten the partial recount if he hadn't brought over a million people into the streets.