Vote Recount Confirms Pena Nieto as Winner

Mexico’s election recount has declared PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto the winner, but the controversy is not over yet. Vote buying and corruption allegations have now surfaced from opposition candidate Lopez Obrador.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Mexico City-based reporter Franc Contreras.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. The recount of votes from Mexico’s presidential election did not change the outcome. Election officials say the winner is still Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. But that hasn’t stopped the complaints from the candidate who came in second, Andras Manuel Lopez Obrador. He’s vowing to challenge the results in the courts. The vote was marred by allegations of vote-buying by the PRI and its supporters. Reporter Franc Contreras is in Mexico City. Franc, how did this election get to this point?

Franc Contreras: Well, according to the challenger, Leftist candidate Andras Manuel Lopez Obrador, he says all this happened weeks, if not months, before the election took place on July 1st, Marco. He says that the Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose candidate is Enrique Pena Nieto, the now-official president-elect of Mexico, he says that candidate and his party used a scheme to buy off the vote and coerce people around the country to give their votes to the PRI candidate. And so Lopez Obrador says his next task is to gather this evidence and present it to a court here.

Werman: From what I understand, Franc, vote-buying in Mexico isn’t so black and white. Are these allegations going to be difficult to prove?

Contreras: I think they’re going to be very difficult to prove. Many people around the country and even around the world believe that the president-elect of Mexico is Enrique Pena Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and so it really is going to be a difficult legal challenge now for Lopez Obrador and his team of lawyers to show that actual vote fraud did take place. This week he gave a news conference, Marco, at his campaign headquarters, Lopez Obrador. And he was standing in front of walls that were essentially wallpapered with these plastic, pre-paid cards. He says that a national supermarket chain called Soriana made a deal with the Institutional Revolutionary Party to give people this debit card in exchange for their vote.

Werman: Now, the candidate who came in third, Josefina Vazquez Mota, with the National Action Party, she has said that this episode should be the start of reforming electoral laws in Mexico. What are the main things in the laws there that critics have problems with?

Contreras: The biggest problem that critics find is the way the votes are actually tallied, they say. What happens is that citizens conduct the tallies at the local level inside the voting stations. Then they place that information onto a vote form, and the form is sent to the federal electoral officials, and then the officials take that form and they count up the votes. So they’re not really counting up the votes. What they’re doing is counting up the tallies on those official forms, so the problem is that according to Lopez Obrador, some of the numbers were changed.

Werman: How much has this election and these results shattered Mexicans’ trust in their system?

Contreras: There’s still a huge number of Mexicans who believe that vote fraud did take place. Whether or not that’s true, that’s what they actually believe, so they’ve lost faith entirely, they say, in their electoral system. They say they already had lost that faith back in 2006 when the vote was so close and a lot of people back then were claiming vote fraud took place. That was never proven. But now, something very similar, from their point of view, seems to have taken place here, and I think what we’re seeing is a young generation of Mexicans coming up through the universities here, and many of them simply do not believe that the institutions here can guard a free and fair election. And, you know, that’s not a very good thing for any country, is it?

Werman: Reporter Franc Contreras joining us from Mexico City. Thanks a lot, Franc.

Contreras: Thank you, Marco.

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