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Smooth Election Day for Voters in Baja

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

In Tijuana’s dusty colonia of Flores Magon--a motley spread of rickety homes far from the nearest paved road--voters were divided Sunday.

To Francisco Perez, an unemployed father of three, the National Action Party (PAN), which has been governing both Tijuana and the state of Baja California, has ignored the needs of workers.

But Carmen Granados, a 54-year-old mother of 10, remembers the years when the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was in power as an era of “pure promises,” when she and her neighbors were driven in government buses to cast their votes in a false show of support. Before the PAN came to power, “this neighborhood was abandoned,” she said.

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While differences of opinion are nothing new in Baja California, residents, for the first time ever, cast their votes Sunday with some degree of confidence in the electoral process.

Baja California has made history by running what observers expected will be the cleanest election ever held in Mexico, and the first ever to be managed by a party other than the PRI, formed in 1929.

Voters cast their ballots Sunday for the mayors of Tijuana, Ensenada, Tecate and Mexicali, and 19 delegates to the state congress. Voter turnout appeared high, officials said. Final results are expected Wednesday.

The state became the first to be won by an opposition party when Ernesto Ruffo Appel and his conservative PAN won the governorship three years ago. This year, a state electoral registry created by Ruffo issued more than 822,000 photo identification cards to voters.

The technology was designed to cut down on the type of fraud that has become synonymous with Mexican elections: pre-stuffed ballot boxes, pre-marked ballots and lists bloated with names of repeat or dead voters.

On Sunday, each voter was fingerprinted and each card was carefully compared to a computerized list showing the same photo and signature. See-through ballot boxes were to be publicly sealed at the polling sites at the end of the day.

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“It means that there won’t be fraud. I pray to God that all goes well,” Granados said. “I hope it means that people will open their eyes and see that we are here. That we are the voters.”

The atmosphere of voter accountability generated more competition among candidates, who showed up two weeks ago for a debate in Flores Magon for the first time ever.

West of Flores Magon, in the tranquil and more affluent neighborhood of Playas de Tijuana, voters shared the optimism.

“It shows that there is democracy,” Ruben Abreu, a 37-year-old businessman, said of the new voting procedures.

“We have an assurance that our vote will be respected,” added Rocio Hernandez Ruiz, 19, a medical student and PAN volunteer observer at the precinct. “If we don’t think our vote is respected, we don’t vote.”

At selected polling places throughout the state, nearly 200 nonpartisan volunteers monitored the electoral process. The volunteers were recruited by the state Human Rights Commission and the non-government Mexican Academy of Human Rights.

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Sunday’s election marked the first time a state-run human rights commission and state government gave academy observers full access to everything from closed official meetings to the ballot-counting process.

The observers will release their findings Tuesday.

Many voters Sunday said they believe the federal government as well as other states will follow Baja California’s example.

While most party officials and voters expressed confidence that Sunday’s election would be clean and fair, PRI officials say more than 100,000 eligible voters--many of them PRI supporters--never received voting cards.

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