Returns Show PRI Landslide in Mexico; Fraud Charged : Elections: Ruling party has 60% of vote with 15% of precincts reporting. Slow ballot count fuels opposition’s suspicions.

Election returns reported Monday showed the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party to be winning a landslide victory in federal and state elections, but the party’s triumph was marred by a slow vote count and opposition charges of fraud.

The governing party, called the PRI, gained more than 60% of the votes in Sunday’s mid-term elections for all of the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies and half of the 64-seat Senate, according to partial results made public by the Federal Electoral Institute.

The conservative National Action Party won 22% of the vote and the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, suffered a crushing defeat by winning only 7%, according to the institute’s figures.

The PRI claimed also to be winning all six of the governorships at stake in the elections, including hotly contested races in the states of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi. But opposition leaders asserted that the votes in those two states were rigged.

In Guanajuato, National Action candidate Vicente Fox said that he was the winner.

“We’re collecting all the information, all the documents of what was a giant fraud,” he told reporters. “I demand that they declare me governor of Guanajuato. I know that, if we count honestly . . . they can’t say we didn’t have the majority of votes.”

The state electoral commission said that PRI candidate Ramon Aguirre was leading with more than half of the vote. But National Action leaders in Mexico City claimed that Fox received 58% of the vote. And the Democratic Revolutionary Party’s candidate, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, said his party’s calculations also showed Fox to be winning with 50% to 55% of the vote.

In San Luis Potosi, the two leading opposition parties had united behind the candidacy of Dr. Salvador Nava. Nava told reporters that the election was fraught with irregularities and that he would not recognize the official results.

“There was no democracy in San Luis Potosi,” Nava said.

The most common problems concerned missing and stolen ballot boxes, official coercion of poor farmers to vote for the PRI and large numbers of citizens with election credentials who were not allowed to vote because their names did not appear on official registration lists, opposition leaders said.

Electoral honesty has been a crucial issue in the campaign. The PRI has won nearly every major election since taking power in 1929, and it frequently has been accused of stealing votes. At present, the governor of Baja California is the only one of the nation’s 31 governors who is a member of an opposition party.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s own election three years ago was blemished by charges of extensive fraud. Cardenas’ supporters assert that he won the presidency, but the government recognized victories of his party only in the federal district of Mexico City and in four states. Still, that was enough to give the opposition unprecedented power, and, for the first time, nearly half the seats in the national congress.

Salinas promised clean elections this time under new electoral laws passed last year, establishing the Federal Electoral Institute and requiring updated voter registration lists and credentials.

But the institute’s slow vote count appeared to be fueling opposition charges of irregularities. The results announced Monday afternoon were based on less than 15% of the nation’s precincts. The figures did not make clear how many legislative seats the PRI was winning or if the party is likely to achieve its goal of a two-thirds majority in congress, which is needed to make constitutional changes.

In 1988, a slow vote count and government claims that a computer system crashed were considered by the opposition to be part of the ruling party’s fraud.

National Action leader Cecilia Romero Castillo said the electoral institute has shown that it is “incapable of giving results. The system for processing the election is ineffective.”

PRI spokesman Javier Aguirre Vizzuett defended Sunday’s balloting and said that opposition charges of fraud were an excuse for defeat.

“Fraud is what they cry when they lose. We have proof--the vote count from each precinct--that shows victory is ours,” Aguirre said. “They are losing because their political work was exclusively in criticizing the (PRI) and the government. They had no serious political platform.”

The PRI’s surge at the polls apparently had more to do with President Salinas’ popularity and a government public works program than with the ruling party itself. Many voters expressed admiration for the president, who has stabilized the nation’s economy.

The government has spent billions of dollars on building schools and on water, electricity and sewage projects. In the days before the election, Salinas inaugurated highways and a new Metro line and handed out thousands of land titles to poor families.