Thursday, July 06, 2006

Tied Election In Mexico

NYT: In Close Mexico Race, Tabulation Is Under Way

With tallies taken from about 93 percent of the polling places, the electoral authorities reported that the count had tilted toward the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had 36 percent of the vote, while the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, had 35 percent....

Still, for most of the day the official tallies indicated a shift from the preliminary count, which had shown Mr. Calderón in the lead from the beginning, and had ended giving him a feather-thin margin, 0.6 percent.

The official count began amid a volatile political storm kicked up Tuesday by the announcement by federal electoral authorities that some three million votes went untabulated in the preliminary count; by demands from Mr. López Obrador for a vote-by-vote recount; and by objections to those demands from the government.

Mr. Calderón, backed by big business and President Vicente Fox, appeared before the news media to repeat his claims of victory. Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who has the support of the poor, held his own news conference to restate his case that the election had been rigged.
The boxes that have been manually recounted show numerous errors, usually in favor of the conservative candidate. This recount is only retallies of boxes of ballots and only recounting ballots inside of boxes where the tally on the box showed an error.

New report - With nearly 98 percent of the vote tallies recounted, Calderon had 35.62 percent of the vote, while Lopez Obrador had 35.57. It was the first time since counting began early Wednesday that Calderon held the lead.


No comments: