Letter From Mexico
The Recount
In early September we’ll learn how the Mexican government plans to paper over the controversial outcome of this summer’s presidential race. As I saw for myself, it won’t be easy.
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“He looks like a hippie,” I carped after Alejandro introduced me to Oscar. Alejandro explained in an apologetic way that Oscar had just returned to Mexico City after seven years as a traveler who earned bus- and airfares by juggling fireballs in plazas across Central and South America. “We’ve been friends since law school,” he explained. “He was a good lawyer.”
Ten minutes later, I was standing on the sidewalk with Oscar, waiting for the van that would take us to Teziutlán. With us stood Oscar’s girlfriend, a thin blonde named Cristina, whom he’d traveled with for six of his years on the road. A graduate of Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, she was a fire juggler herself. On this trip to Teziutlán, she was merely along for the ride.
Eight of us climbed into a dark-blue van, which had four school bus—style passenger benches. In the front seats sat our drivers, Amado and Gaspar, both balding young men who, like Alejandro, were natives of Iztapalapa, a thoroughly working-class district on the eastern side of Mexico City. Alejandro claimed the seat behind them and promptly fell asleep; Cristina and Oscar took the seat behind him. I found myself sitting on the aisle side of the third bench with Gerardo, a handsome thirty-ish college student who was paging through a history text. Rodrigo, an activist in a black T-shirt, took the bench behind us.
Though Cristina also promptly nodded off, the rest of us chattered excitedly as we got on the road. Gerardo complained that we were being sent on a fool’s mission: to persuade local IFE authorities to recount votes, one by one. We would accomplish nothing, he predicted, because the IFE had already ordered its employees not to recount ballots except where the election code explicitly required it.
Oscar wasn’t buying that. He had turned on the van’s dome light and was flipping through the Código Federal de Istituciones y Procedimientos Electorales, trying to refresh his memory. Section B of Article 247 provides for a recount “if the results of the actas do not coincide, or if obvious alterations of the actas that generate fundamental doubt about the result of the election in the casilla would be detected, or if the acta would not be found in the files of the casilla nor in the possession of the president of the district council.” The language was thick, but to Oscar it said that if the PRD crew found mathematical errors in the tallies, or if the tallies themselves were missing, a recount would have to take place.
ABOUT 7:30 A.M., having nodded fitfully in my seat throughout the night, I fully awakened. We were passing over green hills with steep sides. Girls and boys in school uniforms walked down the narrow shoulder of the road, heading into Teziutlán, as we were. Later that day I learned that Teziutlán has a cathedral with a tiled dome and an indoor market—not a Wal-Mart—two blocks in size. It’s the kind of town where parakeets tell fortunes from their cages and men move vegetables down the streets in carts. On its main street, a physician had hung his sign: “Dr. William,” it read, as if Anglo-Saxon ancestry were a medical specialty of some kind. Because of its altitude, Teziutlán is cool even on July afternoons. The place reminded me of Saltillo forty years ago, before auto plants changed it into an industrial town.
At 7:50 we pulled alongside the curb across from our destination, the district office of the IFE. A soldier was pacing the roofline, two stories up. At the door, we were met by two policemen in black uniforms bearing stainless-steel shotguns. Upstairs more soldiers were in view, M16’s strapped to their shoulders. It was clear that whatever transpired, the revolution wasn’t going to happen that day.
In a room with high ceilings, suited men and women—the chairman and six members of the district’s electoral committee—were taking their places at desks arranged in the form of a U. A computer-linked projector sat in the opening of the U, and a large portable screen was at the other end. Between the IFE committee and the projector, the representatives of three political parties—the PAN, the PRI, and the PRD—were settling in. Alejandro slipped over to introduce himself to the local PRD rep, a balding, middle-aged man in a leather jacket. The rest of us bunched in the aisle. Standing with us were more than a dozen people we didn’t know, most of whom turned out to be local PRD volunteers. They were standing because the six chairs reserved for a public audience were already taken.
The IFE building had also once been a nineteenth-century home, built around a courtyard. Its offices, formerly bedrooms, stood along the margins of the open space, sides to a square. Ballot boxes were stored in a room guarded by soldiers on an opposite side of the building. When the IFE chairman tugged at his tie and called for the report from the first of the 373 casillas in his purview, a young man in a jogging suit went to that room and brought out a box made of corrugated white plastic and sealed with tape bearing the IFE’s name. On its sides, the box was marked with the name and number of the casilla whose records it contained and with the signatures of the officials who had sealed it shut.
An assistant who ran the projector flashed the casilla’s tally numbers onto the screen, and after the box was opened, the chairman recited the numbers from its acta into a microphone: the number of ballots cast for the candidates of each of the five political parties, the number of ballots nullified as unmarked or indecipherable, the total number of ballots cast. The figures on the acta and the screen were in agreement, and the math was correct in both the paper and the electronic report. The chairman called for acceptance of the report, and by a show of hands, the six members of his committee agreed.
The PRD, however, was just getting into gear. The local party representative gave Alejandro copies of the actas from the district. Someone went down the street to buy calculators, pens, and notepads. Oscar began looking for a place to work. After a few minutes he’d persuaded an IFE secretary in an adjoining room to give up a corner of her desk. Gerardo took a seat beside him, and the two began paging through the tabloid-size copies of the actas. Within half an hour, they made their first strike. They’d found an acta whose numbers didn’t make sense. The acta reported a tally of 34 votes cast for one candidate, but its sum indicated that he, or someone else, should have been credited with 100 more. Oscar dispatched the suspect acta with a note to Alejandro, who approached the local PRD representative, urging him in a whisper to challenge the casilla’s report when its number came up for call. Then he backed away and talked into his cell phone, consulting with the PRD in Mexico City.
When the casilla’s number came up, the local PRD representative asked the IFE committee to open the white box and recount its ballots. In no other way, he said, could the acta’s numbers be reconciled. He cited Section B of Article 247 of the election code, the passage Oscar had found. The room went silent as the IFE’s chairman passed around a portable microphone and called for a vote. One by one the committee members assented.
A low hum went around the room. Didn’t the committee members know that the IFE had ordered them not to recount the ballots in boxes whose actas contained only mathematical errors? Or were they merely conscientious?
With a nod from the chairman, two male IFE employees in gray suits sliced the box’s tape with razor-blade cutters. Inside the box were manila envelopes containing the original actas, which the gray-suited men passed to the chairman for reading aloud. The numbers matched those on the screen. Then the IFE secretary, a stocky blonde with rosy cheeks, picked up a fat white envelope that held the ballots for the presidential race. After removing the ballots, the secretary slipped a rubber thimble onto her thumb—one of those odd devices that office-supply stores sell—and began leafing through them, one at a time. Committee members, party representatives, and assorted onlookers gathered around to watch the recount.
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