North-of-the-Border Voting

Will millions of Mexican nationals living in the United States be entitled to go to thousands of polling places north of the Rio Grande to vote in next year’s Mexican presidential election? That’s the question before Mexico’s Senate after years of delay that disenfranchised millions, and it is still unlikely that the daunting logistical challenges can be addressed before the 2006 election. Mexican citizens, like Americans and citizens of many other countries, have a constitutional right to vote in elections even when absent from their homeland, but they have not been able to exercise this right.

The Mexican Congress has been slow to pass legislation enabling Mexicans to exercise their rights, mainly because the various political parties have worried about how they would fare under such a dramatic expansion of the franchise.

Last month, the Chamber of Deputies finally did approve a bill directing Mexican electoral authorities to allow expatriates to vote in the 2006 presidential election. But it’s sloppy legislation that ignores the raft of logistical issues, and pretends that Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute can go about organizing an election on foreign soil as it does in Mexico.

Mexico, which in the last two decades has transformed one of the world’s most corrupt electoral systems into one of the most sophisticated and admired, has no absentee or mail balloting. Voters do have federal tamper-proof photo ID cards. And huge sums are spent registering voters using census data, with elections overseen by armies of trained specialists and drafted citizen poll workers. It’s hard to see how Mexican officials could replicate all this in Los Angeles County and other points north of the border. Every compromise erodes the hard-earned integrity of the process.

The lower house of Mexico’s Congress has left it to electoral officials and the Foreign Ministry to figure it out and help the Senate fix this flawed legislation. This debate started late, but Mexican legislators need to take the time to get it right, even if it means that not all Mexicans in the U.S. will be able to vote in 2006. What’s needed is a gradual process that begins to re-integrate the community into the political process back home.

One idea is to start with the roughly 4 million Mexicans in the U.S. who already have registered in Mexico. They could be allowed to vote in Mexico and possibly at a few designated polling places in this country. The notion of registering millions of new Mexican voters here for 2006 is impractical.

Immigration is a charged issue in this country, and people love railing against the specter of divided loyalties and dual nationalities (although we all loved those recent images of Iraqi Americans voting in this country for a post-Saddam Hussein National Assembly). But state and local authorities on this side of the border should do whatever they can to facilitate the Mexican vote, not only as a matter of neighborly charity. Even anti-immigrant groups should want to encourage a process that will make Mexicans in this country feel as if they haven’t cut all ties to their mother country, to which they send some $18 billion a year.