Millions of Mexicans Take Hopes to Polls : Election: Near-record numbers turn out for watershed balloting. Vote is peaceful. Exit surveys favor Zedillo.

Early unofficial returns and preliminary exit-poll projections today gave Mexico’s ruling party presidential candidate Ernesto Zedillo a wide lead in crucial national elections Sunday that were billed as a watershed of Mexican democracy.

Opposition candidates challenged the early results after a day in which tens of millions of Mexicans discarded their suspicions and fears in favor of hope and poured into polling stations in record numbers. One of Zedillo’s leading opponents, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, called for a mass demonstration in the heart of Mexico City at noon today to “make an intransigent defense of the citizens’ vote.”

But Zedillo’s other principal challenger, conservative candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, struck a more conciliatory tone in a speech televised just after midnight.

“Change has barely begun, but it has begun,” he declared, stressing that he will wait to make any declaration on the result until after the newly elected Congress and an official election tribunal rule on the outcome of the polls. “Even though the system resists dying, it is virtually dead.”

The figures that appeared to bolster the chances of the party that has governed Mexico for the past 65 years came in the form of untested quick counts and exit polls released well in advance of official election returns.

The quick counts that were made public after midnight under an agreement with the official election commission, which had yet to announce any official results, indicated that Zedillo and his governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) would win with about 50% of the vote over about 26% for Fernandez and 18% for Cardenas.

Those tallies were based on actual returns reported unofficially to various groups from a random selection of polling places throughout the country. They came on the heels of two exit polls that projected Zedillo would win by similar margins.

Third-place Cardenas denounced the polls and quick counts as “part of the montage to condition public opinion” at a news conference soon after they were released, and the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party released his own exit poll that showed him winning with 38% of the vote, Zedillo with 32% and Fernandez with 22%.

This is the first election in which the government has permitted quick counts and exit polls, and several analysts said they were as unproven as the opinion polls that showed Zedillo far ahead 10 days before the election.

The national election commission had announced that its first official returns from the crucial poll for a new president and a 628-seat National Congress would be made public only after they tallied at least 15% of the vote, which was not expected until early this morning.

In fact, all three major parties, including the long-governing PRI, appeared to agree in the early morning hours on just one major result of Mexico’s historic election day: Voter turnout appeared huge, with long lines snaking through suburban neighborhoods, slums, rural towns and jungle villages.

Fernandez’s National Action Party unofficially placed the turnout nationwide at 75%, and ruling party sources confirmed that they believed the vote would be a record.

“We have been amazed by the enormous participation, which is unprecedented in Mexican history,” said Salvador Ordaz Montes de Ochoa, director of the National Assn. of Election Observers, one of several umbrella groups that fielded tens of thousands of Mexican poll watchers.

Most analysts had speculated that a large turnout would probably favor the two leading opponents of Zedillo. But the 42-year-old Yale-educated Zedillo, meeting a handful of American journalists in his campaign office as the polls closed, said the turnout favored his governing party.

“It looks like it helped us a lot,” he said.

The balloting was largely peaceful, although there were persistent reports throughout the day of potentially serious irregularities. In particular, there were severe shortages of ballots at special polling places set up for registered voters who were away from their home districts.

But many voters with credentials whose names did not appear on the official voters list, which the government touted as a $730-million investment in clean elections, also were sent to the special polling stations, some of which ran out of ballots before noon.

In other cases, citizens watchdog groups reported that polling places opened hours late, particularly in the state of Yucatan, a stronghold of the opposition National Action Party. In Michoacan, the stronghold of the other major opposition, the Revolutionary Democratic Party, observers saw several cases of “taco” voting, when a voter slips one ballot inside another, then stuffs both into the ballot box.

It was unclear whether the irregularities would affect the final tally, and none of the nine political parties nor the many election observers reported systematic or massive fraud before the counting began Sunday night.

Party officials and the two leading opposition candidates added, however, that they planned to watch closely as the ballots were counted through the night. “Up to now, my only certainty is I’m voting,” said Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), grinning and puffing on a cigar as he prepared to vote in one of Mexico City’s wealthiest neighborhoods. “Later in the night, we will have an opportunity to assess it.”

A few miles away in the middle-class neighborhood of Polanco, Cardenas of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) had a similar view.

“We’ll see what happens during the night,” he told scores of journalists who mobbed him during the half-block walk from his high-rise apartment building to the local polling station. After he cast his ballot, Cardenas told reporters he didn’t vote for himself. As a symbolic gesture he cast a write-in vote for Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, a veteran human rights activist and a symbol of the populist struggle for democracy in Mexico.

Cardenas overwhelmingly won the vote in Mexico City during the last presidential elections in 1988--taking 60 of its 66 districts--and many of his supporters believe he won nationwide as well. They contend he was cheated out of the presidency through massive fraud after the government’s central computers crashed while tabulating the vote.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the ruling party victor in those elections, has sponsored a wide array of political reforms and spent $2 billion on new electoral safeguards that he has promised will make Sunday’s poll Mexico’s cleanest, fairest and most transparent this century.

Many voters appeared to share Salinas’ optimism in interviews at dozens of polling stations throughout Mexico--from the Tijuana site of the March assassination of PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, to the southern rain forest in Chiapas, site of a guerrilla uprising in January.

Many voters who said they supported opposition candidates also said they expected Zedillo to win. Several cited the ruling party’s vast electoral machine nationwide. Others said they did expect fraud.

“I think Zedillo will win because the PRI has worked on so many campaigns,” said 61-year-old Leobardo Navarro, who arrived from Chicago just in time to cast a ballot he hopes will bring change. “The change, I’m afraid, will have to come from inside.”

Clearly, most voters’ hopes were tempered by the history of fraud and corruption by the ruling party--especially in Mexico’s countryside.

A National Action Party official in Baja said bluntly, “It is in the hands of the dinosaurs (the PRI old guard). If they realize that things have changed, then things will be OK. If they think they can get away with what they have done in the past, then this is going to be a real mess.”

In the mountainous state of Guerrero, where extreme poverty and rumors of guerrilla movements abound, seven truckloads of soldiers took up positions in the hills above the town of Tototepec on Saturday night. As in most areas of the country, turnout there was high but the mood tense.

In the district capital of Tlapa, anti-riot police were out in force, and Cardenas supporters said they were accumulating reports of irregularities. But local PRD leaders said they had not decided whether to formally protest.

Early, unscientific returns from three polling stations in the heart of Tlapa appeared to confirm Merino’s assessment. There, counting ended early in the evening and showed the ruling party with a 3-to-1 edge over Cardenas’ second-place PRD.

The head of Tlapa’s chapter of the Civic Alliance, an activist organization that has fielded election observers nationwide, summed up the feelings of many in Mexico’s countryside.

“The ideal result for us would be for the voting to be clean and for people to accept it,” said Joaquin Flores. “But I guess that’s a little utopian.”

Times researcher Susan Drummet in Mexico City and special correspondent Joel Simon in Guerrero contributed to this report.