Mexico Vote Clouded by Slow Count : Officials Quarrel Over Tally; Salinas Victory Questioned

Promised general election results dribbled out here Sunday as members of the Federal Election Commission quarreled over the tally. The very first block of returns were sent back because they did not add up.

The snail’s pace of the government in making public the results of Wednesday’s election cast doubt on the claim to victory of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. The uncertainty over the final count was becoming critical because a second candidate has claimed victory and a third insisted that he is really in the lead.

Furthermore, while the Election Commission has been able to announce only a small portion of the results at its own public sessions, Mexico City newspapers have published tabulations of up to half the vote--figures that they say were provided to them by the commission.

Salinas Total Put at 50.5%

The latest such newspaper count gave 50.5% to Salinas of the PRI, as the ruling party is known. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of a leftist coalition who has claimed victory for himself, received 30%, according to that count, while conservative Manuel J. Clouthier, who puts himself in the lead, trailed with 17%.

High-ranking Salinas aides characterized such percentages as preliminary results. Salinas, in support of his own claim Friday to the presidency, distributed to reporters figures showing him to be leading with 47%, which he called the “real results.”

Final official results for the presidency, for 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and for 64 Senate seats were to have been made public Sunday. But at the pace the figures were being released Sunday, a final count could take days.

300 Electoral Districts

At its morning session, the commission secretary read returns for the congressional races in two districts before taking a break. He read returns for four more congressional districts in the afternoon session before the commission again recessed. There are 300 electoral districts and three races to be tallied in each of them.

The commission’s first recess came after members from the conservative National Action Party objected to the results from District 8 of Mexico City. In the election, voters were selecting among candidates for two classes of seats in Congress on a single ballot, but the tally for District 8 showed a 6,000-vote discrepancy between the two.

“You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that the figures are illogical,” said National Action representative Francisco Plancarte.

PRI representative Maria Emilia Farias agreed that the figures did not make sense, but she attributed it to an innocent mix-up. “You know the poll presidents and secretaries are just ordinary people, they didn’t go to Harvard,” she said.

The session ended so that the commission could look into the problem.

Officials Offer Excuses

PRI officials, evidently worried by the slowness of the returns, were offering numerous excuses on behalf of the commission, the latest being that everything is being done by hand, according to a senior Salinas aide.

“The PRI would very much like to have results,” said Salinas spokesman Juan Enriquez. “It is in our interest.”

Enriquez said that Salinas will win the presidency with about 50% of the vote and that the PRI will have a majority of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and at least 58 of the 64 seats in the Senate.

Some Salinas backers have blamed delays in reporting results on Interior Secretary Manuel Bartlett Diaz, who heads the Election Commission and was Salinas’ rival for the PRI presidential nomination. But some Bartlett defenders say that he may be caught in the middle between Salinas’ backers, who would like to honestly recognize the dimensions of the party’s losses in the Chamber and the Senate, and the old party bosses, who want to “beef up” the PRI’s share of the vote in order to retain congressional seats for their people.

According to the analysts, party traditionalists feel that Salinas benefited from the old patronage system and that, therefore, they should continue to do so as well. Salinas was handpicked for the PRI candidacy by Mexico’s current president, Miguel de la Madrid.

Cardenas Left PRI

Cardenas, 54, the son of one of Mexico’s most popular presidents, the late Gen. Lazaro Cardenas, abandoned the PRI last year after failing in a move to get the party’s presidential nominating system changed. The PRI has ruled for the last 60 years, during which each of the party’s succeeding presidential candidates has been picked by the party’s outgoing incumbent. Thereafter, most of the PRI’s presidential candidates have been elected to office with 80% to 100% of the vote. The previous lowest total was that of De la Madrid, who polled 70% six years ago.

Some analysts suspect that Salinas may not have received even the 50% that his campaign headquarters is claiming and that the vote is being “adjusted” to give him a majority, however small.

“The party ideology is that the PRI is the majority,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a fellow of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The PRI claimed to be the republic, the conscience and interpreter of the will of the people. . . . But if the people voted massively against the PRI, they are sitting on top of a fragile social situation.”

Cardenas has accused the PRI of trying to steal the election from him and said that if Salinas took office it would amount to a coup d’etat. He claimed to be ahead with 38.8% of the vote and to have inside information from the government that he had won.

Demand Clean Count

Cardenas’ backers gathered at district election centers around the nation Sunday to demand a clean vote count, and they called for a public demonstration Wednesday to press his claim to the presidency. Meanwhile, supporters of PAN, as the conservative National Action Party is known, blocked international bridges into the United States and Guatemala in civil disobedience protests.

The candidate of the radical Revolutionary Workers’ Party, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who received few votes, backed Cardenas in his assertion of victory. At a late-night press conference Saturday, Ibarra offered this statement as proof of fraud against Cardenas: “In Aguascalientes, they gave us more than 4,000 votes, and we know we only had 700.”

The nearly comic fumbling over the final vote count has fueled suspicions and rumors among the public that Cardenas may really have won. When the count began after the polls closed Wednesday night, government officials confidently predicted partial returns by mid-evening. But suddenly, the count stopped, and officials announced that the computers had broken down. The first results, from about 1,000 urban precincts, showed Salinas and Cardenas running neck and neck.

The delay continued the next day, but the excuse for it changed: Bad weather in parts of Mexico had delayed compilation of ballots, Interior Secretary Bartlett said.

On Sunday, Bartlett accused the opposition of having spread the “slanted” version about the computers. It was the telephones, not the computers, that had jammed, he said.