López Obrador says Mexican election rigged

Andrés Manuel López Obrador accused Mexico's electoral commission of fixing the Presidential election by computer fraud.

López Obrador announced that he would challenge the election results in Mexico's Supreme Court. It's not clear whether the Supreme Court of Mexico can rule on such a case, or whether the electoral courts have the final say on elections.

I'm finding it difficult to get a sense of the merits of López Obrador's charges. How likely is it that the Mexican election was stolen?

The PRI party has stolen elections in the past. The 1988 election was marred by electronic voter fraud that gave the PRI candidate victory over a leftist opponent.

However, observers from the European Union saw no evidence of fraud on Election Day 2006. However, it's not clear from the article whether the EU team would have been in a position to observe the type of electronic voting fraud that López Obrador is alleging. The observers agree that a vote-by-vote recount, which López Obrador is requesting, would be the most accurate way to settle the issue. However, Mexican law does not allow for vote-by-vote recounts. Sealed ballot boxes can only be opened if they bear visible signs of tampering.

If anyone can recommend some independent analyses of the security of the Mexican vote, please let me know. I don't think the established media are doing a very good job assessing the fundamental issue, namely, whether there's evidence that the vote tallies in the central computers were altered.

Comments

[pansauce]

Democracy Now has been covering this topic better, and in more detail, than any other media outlet that I know. It's worth listening to and you can probably expect more coverage on tomorrow's show.

[TB]

A rigged Mexican election?

Now what does that remind me of?

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

[12]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/9/13465/46853

While many foreign observers have been quick to claim the there were no significant electoral irregularities in the process that formally awarded a half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, the candidate of President Fox's right wing National Action Party, Greg Palast is not among them. The first journalist to expose the massive voter suppression tactics that Jeb Bush employed in Florida in 2000 to ensure his brother's ascension to the White House, has an article in the Guardian (UK) in which he suggests that ChoicePoint, the same company the Jeb Bush employed to purge Florida's voting rolls of African Americans, may have operated in Mexico to scrub the voting rolls of leftist voters.

(The election in Mexico is definitely rigged. enough funny dealing to doubt the whole thing)

[lambert strether]

Conservative Calderon's brother-in-law wrote the vote counting software, and it's already been hacked.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I can't vouch either way, for its accuracy or lack thereof, but this link: http://phoenixwoman.blogspot.com/
provides an interesting graph, pulled from this site:

of Al Giordano's. The graph shows the late surge in Calderon voting, which was explained by saying that Calderon strongholds were counted last; however, the phoenixwoman article points out that if that were true, the PRI candidate would also have shown an uptick, whereas in fact the PRI candidate's count remained flat.

[Trystero]

The hell? They can only unseal ballot boxes if they've been tampered with? What is the point of mainitaining them under seal then?