Mexican court fuels voter doubt

Mexican court fuels voter doubt
The ruling settling the disputed election puzzles legal experts.

Los Angeles Times

MEXICO CITY - Top electoral officials and judges are feeding doubts about the outcome of Mexico’s presidential vote by declining to release details about a recount of 4 million ballots and by moving quickly to destroy all 41 million ballots, legal experts said Friday.

The seven judges of the Federal Electoral Tribunal declared conservative candidate Felipe Calderon president-elect on Tuesday. But the tribunal’s 300-page ruling on the election left some experts shaking their heads.

John Ackerman, a professor of law at the National University of Mexico, said the judges had made no effort to investigate improprieties in electoral financing and other charges made by losing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The ruling also failed to cite a single legal precedent in its rejection of a Lopez Obrador bid to have the election annulled, Ackerman said.

The court opened ballot boxes and recounted 4 million votes, but did so only to determine whether there was evidence of outright fraud - and declared that they had found none. The actual tallies from the recount were not released to the public.

"The tribunal is explicitly preventing us from seeing what actually happened in the partial recount," Ackerman said. "The result of all this is that we don’t have certainty about the election."

A spokesman for the Federal Electoral Tribunal said the judges would not comment on their ruling. He said no further information would be released on the recount.

On Thursday, the Federal Electoral Institute (known as the IFE in Spanish), the independent body charged with organizing elections, denied a request by Ackerman, the investigative magazine Proceso, and others to have access to the ballots.

By law, ballots here are destroyed after an election is certified as official. But the law does not stipulate when destruction should be carried out.

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