Officials Back Efforts to Cast Mexico Ballots

Mexican citizens living in the United States should be allowed to vote in elections back home without having to return there, a group of Mexican officials was told Sunday.

Sixteen Mexican federal legislators and the governor of the state of Oaxaca pledged to push for legislation in Mexico’s congress in March that would allow such voting rights.

“It’s a struggle for power, a social demand, and what we’re seeing is the movement gaining momentum,” Jesus Martinez- Saldana, a Cal State Fresno professor of Chicano and Latin American studies, said at a forum sponsored by the Council of Presidents of Mexican Federations of Los Angeles.

The voting rights issue has been debated for decades, but only recently has it come to the forefront of Mexican politics, Martinez-Saldana said.

Lawmakers in 1996 approved electoral reforms, which were never implemented, that would have allowed Mexicans living abroad to vote in elections without having to return to Mexico.

After his election in 2000, Mexican President Vicente Fox promised to implement the reforms. Fox benefited when scores of people returned to Mexico to vote for him when he ousted the candidate of the long-running PRI party. But Fox has made little progress on the promise of absentee voting, legislators said Sunday.

“He forgot,” said Sen. Adrian Alanis. “We’ve built a consensus to get this done by legislative means. What we don’t have is the consensus of ‘how.’ How to vote? Who can vote? Where?”

Another question that lawmakers said they want to consider is whether Mexicans who have dual citizenship should be allowed to vote in Mexican elections. Several speakers acknowledged that not all lawmakers in Mexico are convinced that such rights should be granted.

“There’s a fear in Mexico that the migrant vote will destabilize Mexican politics,” Martinez-Saldana said, adding that 60 countries allow their citizens to vote by mail when they are out of their native lands. For instance, the U.S. allows diplomats and military personnel to cast absentee votes when they are assigned abroad, he said.

Some have advocated that Mexicans abroad should be able to elect their own representatives to that country’s congress.

After the lawmakers read a declaration pledging to take the drive for the proposed electoral reforms back to Mexico City, the standing-room-only crowd in the large lecture hall at USC stood and cheered.

“I’ll vote if I can,” said 62-year-old gardener Perdo Silva, who said he recently became a U.S. citizen and has not voted in elections in his home state of Michoacan in 30 years. “I send money home, and I want to help more.”