High Marks for a Remarkably Fraud-Free Day

The bitterly divisive campaign for Mexico’s next president reached its final act Sunday amid remarkable unanimity on one score: Despite some worrisome irregularities, the balloting gained early praise from domestic and foreign observers as apparently free of widespread fraud.

There were scattered complaints of cheating by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose history of past vote manipulation is legendary. In the southeastern state of Yucatan, PRI mayors in two towns allegedly commandeered the voting.

But most early signs around Mexico pointed to a relatively orderly and free election--a product, many said, of a host of electoral reforms put in place during the last decade.

Here in a verdant belt of tiny family farms two hours southwest of Mexico City, voters disagreed vehemently about who should win the down-to-the-wire presidential race. Yet they endorsed the reforms--from new voting booths to fraud-proof voter ID cards--that changed election day habits in ways large and small.

A stone’s throw from a 16th century church, voters wearing cowboy hats eased their way into gleaming white booths designed to accommodate only one person at a time and equipped with plastic curtains to block prying eyes. Civilian volunteers, trained by a recently independent federal election institute, took charge of voting sites once run by the PRI. Though polls opened an hour late, rookie poll officials said that was because it took longer than expected to assemble the booths, emblazoned with the slogan “The vote is free and secret.”

Polling site supervisor Erick Orihuela Jaramillo, an electrical company employee, said the line of voters 50 deep waiting in the stone-paved town square showed healthy turnout and was a sign of confidence in the reforms. Representatives of opposition parties who spent the day watching for misdeeds by the PRI found little to report.

“There were problems before [election day]. But what we’re seeing today looks normal,” said Alberto Gonzalez, a teacher volunteering for the center-left Democratic Revolution Party. “Today, the second of July, is going fine.”

Skeptical voters in other regions were withholding judgment until after the ballots were counted by hand.

“The tricks come later,” said Encarnacion Camacho--a homemaker voting in the rural town of Suchiapa near Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of the southern state of Chiapas--referring to the vote-counting.

In Mexico City, the capital, meanwhile, observer groups were offering upbeat early assessments, though they cautioned that complaints from around the country still were being collected.

“This is a clean election with a few isolated problems,” said Mariana Duran, spokeswoman for Alianza Civica, a Mexico City-based watchdog group that had accused the ruling party of coercing voters in the weeks before the election through its control of needed government services.

The race was the most closely watched in the country’s history, with about 860 foreigners and more than 36,000 Mexican observers scattered at polling sites around the country.

“My own personal observation has been that this has been an orderly process. I have been nowhere where there were complaints,” said former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who toured six sites as part of a group of 45 U.S. Democrats visiting various voting locations.

Elsewhere, the Carter Center said it was looking into reports that an observer from Italy was threatened after finding fraudulent ballots marked in favor of the PRI in the southeastern state of Campeche. The allegation was reported by the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, whose presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, was shown in preelection polls to be in a dead heat with the PRI’s Francisco Labastida.

“We said we would look into it, but we don’t have any conclusions on that,” Carter Center spokeswoman Deanna Congileo said.

In the Yucatan case, the head of the state PAN said that PRI mayors in the towns of Tepakan and Buctzotz had taken control of voting to see how ballots were being marked. The alleged move was an attempt at intimidation, said Jose Castanera Perez, the PAN’s state president.

Observers in other areas were disturbed to see groups of PRI officials near ballot boxes. At one polling site in the state of Mexico, a PRI representative was taking marked ballots directly from voters for deposit into the see-through ballot boxes, said Eric Olson, who directs the Mexico program at the Washington Office on Latin America.

In Malinalco, representatives of the two main opposition parties charged that local PRI officials were treating voters to free breakfasts and then transporting them en masse to the polls. Some charged that the PRI was paying voters as much as $50 each to vote for the party, which has governed Mexico, and held local power in this scenic rural corner, for 71 years. But those reports could not be confirmed independently.

Noe Zamora, a local PAN leader, hustled about with a camera in hopes of proving charges that the PRI was handing out cooking oil, rice and basic goods in exchange for votes.

“I want to catch them when they’re giving it away,” he said.

He could simply have asked farmer Roberto Zamora, a PRI supporter who said he accepted a bag of beans and some sugar last week from the party.

Zamora’s wife, Sara Vargas, said the couple were not told how to vote, but the implication was clear: “They didn’t tell us anything. We know that every person has to do what he has to do.” Both voted for the PRI.

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Ellingwood reported from Malinalco and Kraul from Tuxtla Gutierrez.