The PRI Cranks Up Its Steamroller : Forcing Through of Dubious Tallies Tarnishes Mexican Vote

The credibility and cleanliness of Mexico’s July 6 election results are beginning to resemble cheap wine: They are not getting any better with time. The more the extraordinarily complicated and bureaucratic legal procedures drag on, the greater the number and gravity of the questions that are emerging.

To begin with, individual results from nearly half the country’s polling places--both the actual votes and the official tally from each--have not yet been made public or available to the political parties--government or opposition--that participated in the election. The statistics published so far, on which the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) has based its claim to victory for Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and which the opposition has challenged, are based on the 300 district tallies that theoretically are the sum of the local polling-place tallies corresponding to each district. Ten days after the election, the government released about 30,000 computer-generated polling-place tallies--without the accompanying documentation of tally sheets. As of last week, the results from the remaining 25,000 polling places were still undisclosed.

In principle, the district tallies and the polling-place results coincide, but, given the government’s record since election day, suspicions are mounting that the un-willingness to release the remaining tallies is due to their “non-correspondence”--the belief of many in Mexico that the individual polling-place tallies would not add up to the already published district results. There is a growing clamor for the release of the missing figures and for a recount, polling place by polling place. The sentiment was symbolized by the slogan coined by Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, the former president of the National University and the country’s most respected and senior social scientist: “Las actas ya”--”Tally sheets now!”

The government and the PRI are increasingly resorting to the kind of tactics that they had tried to renounce during the first days after the elections. Mexico’s electoral law has the peculiarity of granting the PRI-government coalition a built-in, automatic majority of appointees at every level of the electoral process: from the polling place through the District and State Electoral commissions to the Federal Electoral Commission and even the newly created Electoral Tribunal. All are stacked in favor of the governing party. But because of Salinas’ sincere hope and ambition to avoid having his election tarnished by charges of tampering and traditional PRI railroading tactics, the government had refrained from using this automatic majority. In fact, it had nearly bent over backward to avoid using the so-called aplanadora , or steamroller, to get its way.

No more. Starting a week or two ago, in the district-by-district deliberations of the Federal Electoral Commission, the PRI and the government began ramming through every questionable district with their 16-9 majority. Thus, of 53 congressmen whose elections were confirmed last Thursday, 15 were approved unanimously but 38 were rammed through by the PRI with the entire opposition--left and right, Cardenistas and Panistas--voting against. Of the 131 congressmen whose elections had been ratified by the end of the week, barely half had been approved by every political party; the other half are PRI legislators who owe their new jobs to the aplanadora. The credibility of their elections gained little by being ratified in this way.

It gained even less by the PRI representatives’ reactions to opposition challenges in the commission, as reported by Mexico City’s most important daily--the often-censored, pro-government Excelsior. Left-wing congressmen questioned the validity of polling-place results in Chiapas, for example, where the PRI obtained up to 1,200 votes per polling booth. If polls were open only for 10 hours (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.), they argued, and the PRI received 1,200 votes (and the opposition none) in several individual locations, each voter accomplished his civic duty in 30 seconds--hardly a believable rate, particularly in some of the most backward areas in the nation. According to Excelsior, the PRI commission members, in the face of such challenges, “simply smiled and voted away.”

Salinas wanted to both win and have a clean and convincing election. In view of what his PRI and government colleagues have been doing since July 6, and particularly in the last week, the second goal appears more and more remote. The designation of his closest aide, reform-minded Manuel Camacho, as PRI leader (formally he is the No. 2 man in the party, but in fact will be in charge) may improve things in the future. But for now the no-longer-so-clean elections are in need of a drastic public wash. Without that, skepticism and the intensity of the opposition’s challenge and indignation will continue to grow.