Mexican election: ¡Fraude!

Subcomandante Marcos:

Good evening. You are listening to Radio Insurgente, the Voice of the Voiceless. We are here invading Radio 620, the music that came to stay. We want to pass on to you some information that the Sexta Commission has received. According to this information, there has been fraud in the presidential elections. The Federal Election Institute, in complicity with the President, held a reserve of between one and 1.5 million votes to be administered in the benefit of the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderon. According to this information, in the afternoon between 5:30 and 6:00, there was a call from President Vicente Fox to Ugalde, the president of the Election Institute, asking him to change the information from the preliminary vote count, so that voting stations that benefited Calderon were entered first, and then the other votes were divided up. According to this information, the PRD candidate would have gone ahead of the PAN candidate by between one million and 1.5 million votes, but thanks to this trick, they have changed the results...

There is a chance that a total recount will be ordered.  Lopez Obrador is demanding one and there's room in Mexican electoral law for adjudication at this point by the Election Tribunal which will have about two months to make a decision.

Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research said this afternoon on NPR that the early count giving Calderon a significant lead "allowed a very false impression to be created at the time where everyone believed that 98.5% of the ballots had been counted and allowed Calderon to claim victory."

Whether Mexican election officials -- and the country at large -- do the right thing depends on how much they've learned not only from past troubles and threats of uprising, but from observing the disgrace their neighbor to the north visited upon itself in 2000.