Official Results in Mexico Elections Favor PRI

Election officials Sunday began releasing results of last week’s elections in five states, and the returns favored the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party. The opposition accused the party of vote fraud.

In the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, alleged massive irregularities and pulled out of the vote count.

The ruling party, known as the PRI, had proclaimed victory all week in the overwhelming majority of state and local races that were held July 2.

The exception was Baja California, where the PRI gave up a governor’s seat for the first time in its 60-year history.

Despite that defeat and PAN’s allegations of fraud, the PRI had repeatedly insisted it had maintained control of the state assembly and Baja’s city halls.

All City Hall Races

In the northern state of Chihuahua, the State Election Commission said Sunday that the PRI had won all 67 city hall races, including the one in Ciudad Juarez, and 17 of the 18 state assembly races.

On the Yucatan Peninsula, the Campeche state Election Commission announced a PRI sweep of the state assembly races. The election commission in the northern state of Zacatecas did the same.

Elsewhere, the official count continued, and results in some areas are not expected for days.

In the central state of Michoacan, contested campaigns by the PRI and its archrival, the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, were followed by competing claims of victory and charges of fraud and voter intimidation.

“We won’t give up a single vote,” the PRI chairman in Michoacan state, Fausto Vallejo, said Sunday as the state election commission continued to tally the vote.

The Michoacan elections were seen as a key contest between the PRI and its leftist opposition.

The official counts that began Sunday involve adding up the tally sheets made by poll officials, who counted the ballots on election day. In the two most hotly contested states, Baja California and Michoacan, opposition parties had representatives watching the actual ballot count at most polling places.

The parties say their victory claims are based on the tallies reported by their poll watchers and election workers.

The PRI’s historic concession in the Baja governor’s race dominated the news here and abroad.