Documentary : Saddling Up to Bring Back the Ballots : Getting the vote out is nothing compared to getting the vote <i> back</i> from some rural regions of Mexico.

Democracy arrives in El Verano on muleback.

Ballots, ballot boxes, vote tally sheets and indelible ink--to mark voters’ thumbs so they cannot vote twice--are slung over the saddle horns of animals that villager Isabel Palomares and her husband, Jose, ride for two hours up steep, narrow mountain paths to deliver a few days before the Sinaloa state election.

They return the same way. And that makes El Verano and thousands of villages like it all across Mexico a big problem for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who has promised reforms in voting procedures that will guarantee clean elections.

Concerns about procedures include the length of time it takes to get returns from the countryside and what happens to the ballots along the way. When votes are tallied, rural areas tend to show up solidly for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI for its Spanish initials.

Such results, combined with the delay in getting them, raise suspicions of electoral alchemy--the mysterious process similar to turning lead into gold by which votes for the opposition are turned into votes for the PRI. Mexicans worry that party leaders use the time to cut back-room deals: a few city halls to the opposition in return for a clear PRI majority in the state legislature.

Election officials respond that there are legitimate reasons for the holdup. First, all Mexican ballots are counted by hand after the polls close. Then, there are the problems of getting the tallies from remote villages such as El Verano, high in the mountains, far from roads or telephones lines.

The delay in getting results is among the most frustrating aspects of covering Mexican elections. I have agonized through enough Mexican election nights--watching the minutes tick away to deadline and frantically trying to get preliminary results, pre-preliminary results, any results--that I wanted to know what really happens in those villages.

I didn’t expect anyone to commit fraud right under my nose. But I wanted at least to understand why it takes so long.

So, earlier this month, when the northwestern state of Sinaloa voted for governor, state representatives and several mayors, I spent election day in El Verano, population 225, high in the mountains between the resort of Mazatlan and the Durango state line.

Election coordinator Javier Bastidas was responsible for overseeing elections in four rural precincts, including El Verano, and agreed to take a reporter and photographer along on his rounds. The tall, thin 22-year-old rancher is a familiar figure in the mountain villages, where he taught short courses on a new state election law to precinct officers selected at random from voter registration lists, four for each precinct.

The night before the election, Julian Rios, the personification of the laughing, singing Sinaloa cowboy, gave us a ride in his pickup truck from the county seat at San Ignacio up the mountain to the end of the road at Huiyapa, a village of three families. At dawn the next morning--election Sunday--we rented mules for the rest of the trip to El Verano.

Two hours later we rode up to the village of whitewashed houses with red tile roofs just as voters were arriving at the one- room schoolhouse. Women wore lace dresses and makeup, with their hair drawn back in bows. Men discussed where to place the ballots, voting area and ballot boxes--one each for governor, state representative and mayor--to ensure a smooth flow of the precinct’s 119 registered voters.

An election observer from the right-wing opposition National Action Party (PAN)--a novelty for El Verano, which is accustomed to seeing only PRI representatives--suggested placing the voting area in a secluded place, as the law requires, so people could vote confidentially. But his idea was rejected.

“We’re all PRI members here,” said one gray-bearded elder. “We don’t need all that.”

The women voted first--so they could go home and start lunch, a precinct officer explained--then the men. By 11 a.m., the rush was over and poll officials were waiting for voters from other villages included in the precinct.

Lea Moreno walked an hour down the mountain from La Quebrada to vote. No one else from her village was coming because they had not received the plastic credentials required of voters in Mexico, she said.

With that news, precinct officers began scrutinizing the voter registration list, debating who else actually would come. At noon, with no more prospective voters in sight, they decided to close the precinct, six hours early.

Only 45 of the 119 registered voters had cast ballots. And when they started to count the votes, there were 44 for governor and 46 for state representative--someone had obviously marked the wrong ballot.

For the next three hours, precinct officers--with plenty of conflicting advice from official political party observers and village onlookers--debated how to resolve the problem. As the discussion over that single vote heated up, I began to understand why both alcohol and guns are forbidden in public on election day.

The prospects of getting the ballots back to San Ignacio before dark faded, replaced by a faint hope that we could finish the muleback portion of the ride in daylight.

Finally, everyone agreed that since the PAN had received two votes for each office, the erroneous vote must be for the PRI gubernatorial candidate, and a PRI ballot for state representative should be nullified. After another half-hour of filling out tally sheets and reports from the political party observers--including a note that the ballots were not cast in private as required--we were on our way.

Ballots were sealed in cardboard boxes with tally sheets stuck to the outside and were tied onto Bastidas’ mule. Donasio Ruiz, president of the precinct officers, would hike beside us to supervise delivery of the ballots to the county seat as the new law requires.

Ruiz was responsible for seeing that the ballots delivered were the same ones that were cast. To make doubly sure, PAN election observer Antonio Arrellano went along to keep an eye on the two votes for his party.

We retraced our route down the mountain on muleback, across a stream, half-way up another mountain, around it, then down again. Portions of the trail were so rocky and steep that the mules had to be persuaded step by step to continue, sometimes with a word, more often with a snap on the flank from the end of the lariat tied to the saddle.

We reached Huiyapa at dusk after a two-hour mule ride. Ruiz and Arrellano hopped in the back of Rios’ pickup to guard the ballot boxes, and the rest of us crushed into the cab for the rest of the trip down the mountain over a road that was wider than the mule trail but otherwise not much different.

Bouncing along arroyos and curving around switchbacks for the next four hours in the dark, we listed to Sinaloa polkas, with lyrics about smugglers, bandits and guns: No one escapes alive from a Sinaloa ballad.

Along the way, the back of the pickup filled with ballot boxes and officers from the other precincts Bastidas coordinates, as well as a few people who just wanted a ride to town.

We arrived back at San Ignacio by just past 10 p.m., in plenty of time to fax the tally sheets to the state capital at Culiacan, so that state officials could release early election results that same Sunday night. Because the town telephone operator goes home at 9 p.m. and shuts down the switchboard, Salvador Bastidas had arranged to keep one of San Ignacio’s three lines--the only telephone lines in the entire county--open all night for the new fax machine.

But the fax wasn’t working. The tally sheets just stuck in the machine. In Culiacan, they received nothing.

Commission officials fiddled with the fax buttons and called the state capital for instructions. At 2 a.m., with only the two most remote of San Ignacio’s 51 precincts missing, word came from Culiacan: Take a recess, forget the fax, there would be no preliminary results from San Ignacio County until Monday afternoon.

Statewide, only 7% of the precincts were in by midnight on election day. The PRI candidate for governor was winning with 57%.

On Monday afternoon, a commission official drove three hours to Culiacan--on a paved, two-lane highway--to deliver the tally sheets and the minutes. They were added to the preliminary results released late Monday: The PRI, they showed, won the governorship with 53% of the vote.

The ballots themselves would be collected later in an armored truck and taken to Culiacan. There, a state-level commission met all week to finally resolve matters such as that extra vote for state representative in El Verano. The commission’s final decision was due a week after election day.

Meanwhile, representatives of the PAN and the Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD, the main opposition on the left, were meeting to develop a joint demand that the elections be nullified because of fraud and irregularities.