Remember, it’s all preliminary in Mexico’s vote count. While we were out watching fireworks, Mexico was experiencing post-electoral fireworks of its own. It turns out that Andrés Manuel López Obrador was right that up to three million votes had been excluded from the reported preliminary count.
With just over two and a half million additional votes added to the count, Felipe Calderón’s lead has shrunk to around 0.6%, or about 257,000 votes. About 1.55% of the vote has still not been included in the preliminary results.
Subsequent to my original posting of this item, various reports have shown AMLO pulling ahead. Note that, while this is the beginning of the official count, it is senseless to project an outcome of this close a race until the count is complete. The candidates have rather different regional bases, and thus the order in which districts are scrutinized will affect who leads at any given point in the process. Just sit back and wait!
The comments below by Matt and Rici are really good. Don’t miss them.
One thing that should not be overlooked as the two contending candidates both claim victory based on polls within the margin of error is that the formal institutions charged with monitoring the election as well as the informal media institutions we expect to monitor politics have performed fairly well thus far. No media outlet here in Mexico City that I am aware of released exit polls that showed the race was too close to call; most simply anounced that their polls were not definative and did not present any of the results. Similarly, the IFE made the absolute right call in not calling the race-multiple analysis of the quick count data all showed it was inconclusive even though these quickcount results seem to parallel those from the PREP(there is an interesting report at the IFE website with the quickcount results). Then the IFE has stuck to its guns on following the established procedures and laws for counting the votes and for any recounts that are necessary while keeping the public well informed. In general, the IFe and Media have acted just as we would want them to when a race is too close to call-cautiously. To illustrate the importance of this, imagine what could have been avoided with this type of activity in evaluating the close results in Florida in 2000. So, as one newspaper here declared on Monday, the victor thus far in the election has been democracy; now hopefully the candidates and their followers can act in a way consistent with that goal.
Seed planted by matt — 05 July 2006 @ 08:49
IFE has run the election well, but it may have committed a major blunder in not disclosing that a significant number of polling places had submitted incomplete returns, and thus the votes from those places were not in the PREP.
Not including them while investigating was perfectly reasonable, but leaving it to one of the parties to publicize that there were all these uncounted votes, while IFE was saying over 98% of actas were processed, plays into the PRD’s hands in claiming fraud or bias (even though there probably was none).
Seed planted by MSS — 05 July 2006 @ 09:01
According to IFE president Luis Carlos Ugalde, the fact that inconsistent actas were not going to be included in the PREP was agreed to with the political parties in February. He doesn’t say whether this information was communicated to the media. It wouldn’t surprise me one way or another, because reporters tend to glaze over little details like that and the media kit was something like 50 pages.
The flaw, of course, is that there was no clear statement of that on the PREP web pages. In Perú, the electoral authority (probably more by accident than design) did it a bit better: the departmental reports showed both the number of actas “procesadas” and the number “computadas” (i.e., the former had been examined, and the latter had also been included in the running sum.)
On the other hand, there was a mini-scandal during the Peruvian count, when one minor party candidate cried “fraud” when he noticed that in some of the actas (as in Mexico, in Peru the individual actas are available through the electoral website) had a #-symbol instead of a number where his vote would be.
The ‘#’ indicated that the number was illegible (they were replaced with the actual number during later revisions of the actas), which is all very reasonable and shouldn’t have triggered any suspicions. But the electoral authority never thought of putting a line on the web page explaining what a ‘#’ meant — at least, not until after the accusation of “fraud”.
In a sense, electoral authorities are increasingly in traps of their own design: they are making use of the web in order to demonstrate their transparency, and are publishing more and more information, which does actually make them more transparent. However, they have not emerged from the traditional arrogance of the “authority”; they have not learned the importance of explaining in clear simple language what the information they are presenting means.
In the case of Mexico’s IFE, there was another issue, I think: IFE wanted to be able to brag about how complete the preliminary count was. In 2003, the PREP closed at 94.4%, and they wanted to beat that record. (The PREP is a 24-hour counting marathon; when the clock runs out, it stops.) Showing the percentage of actas processed, rather than the percentage included in the running sum, made the count look more complete than it was. “Pride goes before the fall,” as they say.
Seed planted by Rici — 05 July 2006 @ 09:41
[...] UPDATE: See Matthew Shugart’s new post at Fruits and Votes here. A.M. Mora y Leon @ 11:43 am | [...]
Scion grafted by Publius Pundit - Blogging the democratic revolution — 05 July 2006 @ 11:53
Drama in Mexican presidential election continues
Scion grafted by The Glittering Eye — 06 July 2006 @ 06:39