Half of Eligible Voters May Have Stayed Home : Mexico Revises Election Turnout Claims

Voter turnout in Mexico’s presidential election, hailed at first as an all-time high, may in fact have been lower than it was six years ago when there were fewer eligible voters, new figures indicated Tuesday.

The turnabout is something of a riddle: On election day last Wednesday, Mexican and foreign observers alike said they were certain that the long lines at precincts in many cities spelled an end to voter apathy and meant a boost for opposition candidates.

But according to the latest figures, at least half of the electorate may have stayed home.

New Total for Salinas

Returns made public Tuesday by the Federal Electoral Commission showed Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the candidate of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, to be leading with nearly 54% of the vote. Leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had 26%, while conservative Manuel J. Clouthier was third with 16%.

Electoral officials project a final vote for Salinas of about 9.7 million, with more than 5 million for Cardenas and about 3 million for Clouthier.

Even if this projection is conservative, it is unlikely that the total vote will reach 20 million, although there were about 38 million eligible voters. When Miguel de la Madrid was elected president in 1982, 22 million ballots were cast out of a potential 34 million.

Some observers say they think the difference is attributable to the vote being counted more accurately than in the past. That would be good news for the government and the PRI, as the ruling party is called, which insists that the election was relatively clean.

On the other hand, opponents of the government contend that numerous abstentions give the government a chance to pad its vote in remote districts.

To support this view, they point to the 1982 election. Observers do not seem willing to say that more voters turned out then than did so last week--but officially, the number of ballots cast six years ago apparently will turn out to have been higher.

The conclusion, these observers say, is that De la Madrid was elected as the result of massive fraud.

Said Jorge Dominguez, a Harvard University political scientist visiting Mexico: “The last time, the figures were cooked. Votes are being counted more honestly now. We have a good idea of how many Mexicans really voted.”

And one high government official said, “We are trying to leave the vices of the past behind. In any case, the low turnout suggests to some that voters are not as sold on the importance of elections as many had thought.

“People still stayed home, probably thinking that the PRI was a sure winner,” said Rafael Segovia, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico and an authority on the PRI.

And one Mexican political scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, declared: “I don’t think the turnout now was so bad. It just seems so compared to the last time, when the vote was rigged.”

Nearly a week after the balloting, charges still are being aired that this vote, too, is being fixed. Clouthier, the candidate of the National Action Party, said that there were two elections, one when the people voted, and another later on, when government “alchemists” began brewing the results.

Fraud Charged

Cardenas, the candidate of a leftist coalition, said that the official vote count is “incredible and can only be the result of fraud.”

Insisting that he is the true winner, Cardenas said he plans to challenge the result through various boards established under Mexico’s electoral code.

But some returns from the provinces undoubtedly will give rise to controversy. The state of Chiapas in the far south, for instance, is sending in remarkably one-sided results in favor of the PRI. The state’s District III reported a vote of 76,346 for the PRI, with a total of 1,849 votes for the four opposition candidates combined. In general, the south has been overwhelmingly for the PRI, but even so, the figure seemed high to some.