Baja’s Hex on Voter Black Magic : Reforms: Mexican state unveils high-tech identification cards that are designed to eliminate entrenched fraud at the polls.

A young computer engineer emerged from a voter registration office in this mountainous border town this week and admired his new voter identification card--an unlikely weapon for slaying political “wizards.”

“A piece of paper cannot kill them off completely,” said Rigoberto Olguin, 28, his wife and baby at his side. “But it will make fraud much more difficult. . . . People of a new generation are occupying posts of power and making changes.”

This month, the Mexican state of Baja California unveiled a brand-new, high-tech, painstakingly designed voter registration and identification system aimed at eliminating the fraud that has marred past Mexican elections.

Less than three years after electing Mexico’s first opposition governor in modern history, Baja is making history again: For the first time in more than 40 years, a state, rather than the federal government, will run its local elections.

Some experts say the border state’s reforms represent a fatal blow to the “wizards” or “alchemists,” the shadowy operatives whose electoral black magic on behalf of the nationally dominant Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) has featured disappearing registration rolls and phantom voter brigades.

If the ambitious initiative by Gov. Ernesto Ruffo of Baja’s ruling National Action Party (PAN) works well in the July local elections, observers say, it could spread to other Mexican states, and serve as a model for electoral reforms occurring at the federal level as well.

“It is an important experiment,” said Professor Juan Molinar Horcasitas of UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, an expert on Mexican election history. “If the PAN comes up with a process that works, it will be a big political embarrassment for the government. It will be the first time that a state government does it, without experience or accumulated know-how.”

The state began issuing its identification cards to voters in early January. In addition to the unprecedented use in Mexico of a photo, other elements developed for maximum security are a computerized registry of the photos, fingerprints and signatures; a laser-printed hologram serving as a security seal, and special film and cameras with logos provided by the Polaroid company.

“It has been created as an anti-fraud instrument,” said Tonatiuh Guillen Lopez, a political scientist at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “The technical work has been extraordinary.”

Only a few countries around the world use photo identification cards in elections, said Robert Pastor, a Latin America expert at the Carter Center at Emory University. He said the practice is particularly desirable in countries that are undergoing transitions to increased democracy.

As the election season heats up, however, PRI leaders in Baja are saying that the state government’s anti-corruption rhetoric rings hollow. They charge that the state has set up the first registration booths in PAN neighborhood strongholds, and they question whether Ruffo’s government can register and provide IDs to more than 860,000 voters in time for the July 5 elections for municipal governments and the state legislature.

“The PAN and its candidates campaigned on an offer of change and democratic progress,” said Hugo Abel Castro Bojorquez, state director of the PRI. “Since then we are seeing that, more than advancing democracy, what they want is to win.”

Castro lauded the new measures, but said the PAN is taking too much of the credit for a reform process that has also been encouraged by the PRI and by Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

“In their publicity, they are saying that finally there is a trustworthy credential,” Castro said. “Well, they won the last two elections. Does this mean that their elections were not trustworthy?”

In recent years, Baja has been at the forefront of changes sweeping Mexico’s political map after more than five decades during which the PRI is widely alleged to have resorted to subterfuge and force to preserve its hegemony.

Salinas’ 1988 presidential election involved charges from newly mobilized and strengthened opposition parties that victory was stolen from a left-of-center candidate. The following year, amid new charges of fraud, the federal government conceded that Ruffo won the governorship in Baja California--an urban, politically sophisticated, prosperous state and bastion of the right-of-center PAN.

President Salinas espouses election reform as part of his aggressive national program of modernization and democratization. Among other changes, he has created a Federal Electoral Institute and authorized a new federal election credential with a photo, which has not yet been implemented.

Ruffo capitalized on this climate by winning federal approval of a simple but dramatic proposal: His state would break with a tradition in which states ceded their legally mandated control of local elections to the federal government. It would assume the bulk of the responsibility for conducting the 1992 voting.

“The control is inverted,” said Guillen of the College of the Northern Border. “The state authorities gain open access to the federal registration list. This is unprecedented.”

Carlos Anaya Moreno, 34, director of the State Electoral Registry, said: “We took the approach that we were starting from zero. We wanted the most secure system possible for an accessible cost with all the controls that are possible.”

The first priority was an in-depth review, in conjunction with federal election officials, of the electoral registry created for federal elections in 1991. Mexican opposition forces allege that registration lists are routinely padded with fictitious and dead voters and “shaved” of opposition voters.

Anaya’s staff encountered problems such as 150,000 voters in Baja without known addresses, many of them poor urban or rural residents on streets without names. They upgraded maps to counter this problem. To ensure maximum participation, they doubled the amount of time previously allotted for voter sign-up, extending the deadline from March to mid-May.

They also discovered more blatant anomalies--including a Mexicali woman who had 16 federal voter credentials.

Anaya, who takes pains to stress that his work is nonpolitical, prefers not to talk about past skulduggery. Instead, he emphasizes the changes and safeguards.

The state will pay $2 million to produce and promote the state voter identification card, which is manufactured at the Polaroid plant in Queretaro, Mexico. By the time the program hits full speed Wednesday, officials will be distributing cards from 110 stations around the peninsula, whose population of at least 2 million is concentrated in cities along the U.S. border and its northwest coast.

The use of special materials and film, backed by the computerized registry of identification cards, will impede repeat voting and falsification and doctoring of credentials, Anaya said. The technology compares to that used by multinational corporations for their identification materials, he said.

There is great pressure on the government to complete the program on time and effectively, and PRI officials and some experts say that poses a formidable challenge.

“It remains to be seen whether they can do it,” said Molinar of UCSD. “Maybe they do not have enough time. They have to have enough time to allow the parties to check the final voter lists in June. . . . If the government cannot produce a credible (electoral registry), then the process of political reform gets into muddy waters.”

Anaya said turnout so far has exceeded both his projections and the average of 80 credentials a day per registration station needed to make the deadline. The reception from the voters has been gratifying, he said.

“They get their ID and they are content with it,” he said. “They show it off at work. There is a contagious effect--they bring in their mother and their relatives and their friends.”

A fierce campaign is expected for the evenly divided 15 seats of the state legislature and for the PAN-dominated cities of Tijuana and Ensenada and PRI strongholds of Tecate and Mexicali, the state capital.

The PRI is expected to intensify its accusations of government partiality to the PAN; Anaya dismisses charges that the initial registration posts have been placed intentionally in neighborhoods where PAN supporters are in the majority.

“We are choosing the best, most convenient public places, regardless of politics,” he said. A watchdog committee representing different political parties has open access to his work, he said.

“There is nothing hidden here, nothing secret,” he said. “They have a computer terminal plugged directly into my computer. They can see what I am doing.”

Other states are also expressing interest in adopting the program, according to Guillen and others, who believe the Baja experience will pressure the federal government to speed up its own reforms.

The identification card has become a symbol of political maturity, Guillen said.

“In the past, we saw democratic elections as exceptions or concessions,” he said. “One of the important changes in the regional political culture is that elections are starting to be seen in a new context, as an integral part of being a citizen. The credential is a tangible way of saying that the system is modernizing.”

Symbolism and technology aside, Molinar said, the new role of an opposition state government in the election process will cause increased scrutiny of the elections by all involved.

“It’s pure checks and balances,” Guillen said. “One ambition against another ambition. And the result is good.”