Court Overturns Vote Results in Mexican State

A federal court ruled Friday that unfair practices had fatally marred a critical election and ordered that a new ballot be held.

No, this wasn’t about Florida’s presidential count. It was the Oct. 15 governor’s race in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco.

The long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had claimed victory in the hard-fought election, which would have helped the party recover from its defeat in the July 2 presidential race.

Asserting unprecedented Mexican judicial authority on behalf of clean elections, the Federal Electoral Tribunal threw out the Tabasco result and ruled that PRI candidate Manuel Andrade could not take office Monday as scheduled. The panel said an interim governor must serve until a new election can be held.

The ruling was based largely on what the tribunal said was unfair coverage in favor of the PRI candidate by the state-owned television channel during the campaign. The panel also upheld allegations of vote-buying and ballot-counting irregularities.

The ruling appeared to reflect the maturing of Mexico’s political system from its legacy of unchallenged election fraud that helped keep the PRI in power for 71 years.

Amalia Garcia, national head of the left-of-center Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, exulted, “Today, we defeated the past.”

The tribunal’s decision was a personal blow to the lame-duck PRI governor of Tabasco, Roberto Madrazo, who has been angling to assume the leadership of the former ruling party. The panel specifically criticized the state government for violating principles of neutrality and fairness.

Several PRI lawmakers from Tabasco who oppose Madrazo immediately called on him to resign from the party and said they will abide by the ruling, which cannot be appealed.

Cesar Raul Ojeda, the PRD candidate who trailed Andrade by just 1 percentage point in the vote, told reporters: “I celebrate the decision. . . . We see this ruling as significant in that it will undoubtedly allow us, not just in Tabasco but in the whole country, to organize elections that are based on impartiality and fairness.”

Like many state elections in past years, the Tabasco vote was challenged by the losing parties on the grounds that the PRI had engineered irregularities that made the proceeding unfair and illegal.

In the past, such challenges were routinely disregarded or shelved. But electoral reforms in the 1990s--some pushed by PRI leaders, including former President Ernesto Zedillo--helped level the playing field and created a legal framework that narrowed the scope for electoral mischief.

One of the reforms was to create the independent Federal Electoral Tribunal, which issued Friday’s ruling. It was the first in which a statewide race was declared void.

Tribunal Chairman Jose Fernando Ojesto didn’t take part in the decision--he recused himself because of controversy over his remarks several weeks ago that he didn’t know that irregularities had occurred in Tabasco. In any case, his vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the 4-2 ruling.

The federal tribunal overturned a Nov. 9 ruling by the Tabasco state electoral tribunal that Andrade’s victory by a scant 7,303 votes was valid.

That judgment was appealed by the PRD and the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, which came in a distant third on election day. The PAN is the party of new President Vicente Fox.

Fox, who lost a disputed race for governor of Guanajuato state to the PRI in 1991, said of the ruling: “Certainly, we have to say that our institutions are working and that we respect the law fully.”

The Tabasco tribunal had ruled that the complainants hadn’t proved that the irregularities occurred or that any such problems could have changed the outcome of the vote. Further, the state ruling said that Tabasco law didn’t make specific provisions for annulling a gubernatorial vote.

The federal panel ruled that Tabasco and federal laws do allow for the election to be thrown out if conditions did not guarantee “universal, free, secret and direct suffrage.”

In a majority opinion written by member Mauro Miguel Reyes Zapata, the tribunal said the election needed to demonstrate “a margin of fairness” among the candidates, especially in terms of access to communication media.

In the Tabasco election, Reyes Zapata wrote, evidence showed that the required balance of fairness did not exist. He noted that media monitoring showed that the PRI received 87% of election air time on one major state-run TV channel.

In an election as close as this one, the tribunal noted, the clear favoritism by a state-owned TV channel for the incumbent party’s candidate could easily have been decisive.

The panel also found that on election day, there were irregularities in the handling and counting of the ballots themselves. Furthermore, there also was evidence of vote-buying by the PRI.

“The combination of elements described produces the conviction that in the election for governor of the state of Tabasco,” the judgment said, “the principles of legality, certainty, impartiality and independence were undermined.”