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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Twenty minutes later, in consultation with his secretary, the chairman prepared a revised report. He read the new numbers, and as he did, his technical assistant typed them into his computer, replacing the old numbers on the screen. The chairman allowed time for everyone to see that the change had been made. Then he called for a vote on accepting the revised report; everybody agreed. The new numbers, however, produced a larger margin for the PAN. The PRD workers grimaced and went back to their chores.
The procedure of motions, votes, recounts, and re-votes was repeated a time or two before 9:45, when everything stopped for breakfast. IFE employees brought in scrambled eggs, tamales, sliced bananas, and sweetened coffee for the committee, then invited everyone else into a kitchen to share what was left. For a short while, nobody talked of anything substantive, and introductions were made.
I took the opportunity to occupy a seat on one of the vacated public chairs. A thin white woman with pinched cheeks, in her late forties or early fifties and wearing a homemade pink cotton suit, sat to my right, her tall purse perched on another chair. When the session resumed, as each box was brought in, she rose to snap photos of its numbers and details. Before long she was joined by another PRD supporter, a fat bronze woman in a pink knit blouse. The newcomer had a video camera connected to an extension cord that ran into the adjacent room where Oscar and Gerardo were camped. Whenever a box was brought in, the two women recorded the event; those two and I and anyone else in the area got tangled in the extension cord. One of the gray-suited IFE officials told the bronze woman that she should recharge the video camera’s battery and disconnect the extension cord, but she merely smiled and continued with her obstruction.
By noontime, the PRD’s work had led to the recounting of six boxes, all of which produced higher totals for the PAN. Burdened by sleeplessness, I went back to the van a few minutes later, where Cristina was knotting macramé and Rodrigo was already napping. Two hours later, when I returned to the IFE session, I noticed that something had changed. Whenever the PRD’s representative called for a recount, the chairman simply denied it; no vote was called, and none of the committee members protested. After I’d seen this happen a couple of times, I asked Alejandro what was afoot. “About one-thirty,” he said, “the committee got orders from Mexico City not to open any more boxes because of mathematical errors.”
By 2:30, the committee members had removed their suit coats, and three of them, like students on the back row of a classroom, were jiving and joking to pass the time. They looked up, at the chairman or their peers, only when a vote was called, and the vote was always for accepting the committee’s report, despite the errors cited by the PRD. Half an hour later, the three passed around bags of potato chips, munching idly while business was done.
Things weren’t any better along the wall, where the six public chairs sat. The lady in the pink suit was still jumping up and down from her chair to snap photos. A male PRD volunteer was standing atop another chair, filming with the video rig. The bronze woman sat beside him, cradling the connector between two extension cords in her lap, lest power be interrupted while he filmed. Two secretaries in the adjoining room had stepped away, and their desks had been taken by members of Alejandro’s team. I took a seat at one of them.
I asked Gerardo what the point of the whole exercise might be. “You’re only finding votes for the PAN,” I argued.
“Well, in an election as close as this, don’t you think it’s important that every vote be counted?” he politely said.
My suspicions were not eased. I turned to Alejandro. “Are you sure that you guys aren’t doing this just to keep the scandal of irregularities in the news?” I asked.
“It’s important that every vote be counted, even if that has consequences for the press,” he quipped. Then he smiled his crooner’s smile.
AT 3:30, IFE EMPLOYEES brought lunch to the committee members’ desks. This time, deliberations did not stop, and nobody invited the rest of us to join the repast.
The problem was that the election code requires IFE committees to work “uninterruptedly,” without recessing, until their canvass of actas is done—around the clock, if necessary. The specter of an all-nighter was real. The committee had reviewed only some 180 reports, about half of those before it for the presidential election alone. Reports for congressional and Senate races would have to be reviewed after the presidential canvass was completed. The PRD’s challenges had slowed the process.
The canvass continued in its grumbling and distracted way until 7:15, when the presidential tabulation was done. The PRD had during the day challenged 86 actas, but only 6 had been approved. The committee’s technical assistant went to his computer and flashed a picture of the Mexican flag onto the screen.
At 7:50, as the IFE committee began its canvass of the remaining races, Alejandro’s team said its good-byes to the local PRD cadre and recessed to a pensión where he had rented rooms. Rodrigo and I arrived first. He motioned me to one of the three beds in the second-floor room, about ten by twelve in size. Mine was a single bed; the other two were doubles. I went into a bathroom across the hallway to shower and shave. When I returned, Rodrigo was asleep, and soon, so was I. An old color television was mounted on a steel frame in a corner of the room, next to its door. About ten o’clock, the other men showed up—from supper, I suppose. Someone turned the television on.
An odd thing, still unexplained, had happened that day. As canvasses of the actas were completed across the nation, the IFE would post the results. Alejandro, who received running totals on his cell phone, had kept the rest of us informed. On election night, the IFE’s reports had shown Calderón with a slight advantage for nearly the entire time. But on canvass day, while we’d been in the IFE meeting, López Obrador had enjoyed a two-point lead. Not until 11:00 p.m. had his lead started to fall. Every ten to twenty minutes, new figures were broadcast, and with almost every report, his margin dropped by one or two hundredths of a point.
Six of us lay in our beds, some of us in our underwear, watching AMLO’s lead go down. But we were too exhausted to feel passion of any kind. By 11:30 Gerardo was dead to the world, and by 12:30, when television cameras showed López Obrador leaving his campaign headquarters for home, only a couple of us witnessed it. Nobody was watching at 4:30, when Calderón held a press conference to tell the world that he had won, though he was leading by just over sixth tenths of a point.
BY 7:30 THAT MORNING, all of us were stirring again, and the television told us what none of the team wanted to hear: that it was over. Calderón had won, by a margin that turned out to be only .58 percent. The election had split the nation across a north-south divide, the north in Calderón’s camp, the south with AMLO. Everyone was silent and grim.
On the road back to Mexico City, discussion took an analytical turn. Though the PRD had carried Mexico City, the group derided its mayor-elect, Marcelo Ebrard, whom they viewed as a yuppie with no insight into the life of the struggling masses. They complained that at key points of his campaign, López Obrador had given in to the party’s rightward wing, ignoring, for example, the PAN’s charges that he was a pawn of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Gerardo, who had quit the PRD some six months earlier and had returned only on the election’s eve, vowed that he was quitting for good. Alejandro predicted that the PRD would split into a puny preppy faction and a grimy but principled left. Everyone vowed to stay home that Saturday, when López Obrador would speak at a “national assembly for informational purposes” in Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zócalo.
But despite their disillusionment, five members of the team (everyone but Oscar) turned out on Saturday, when López Obrador announced that he would appeal to the Federal Electoral Tribunal—a seven-member court that has the last word on election results—for a complete recount, “vote by vote, box by box.” To underscore the demand, he called for a series of demonstrations and plantones, or “encampments,” which continue today.
On August 5 the tribunal ordered a review of only 9 percent of the ballots, sparking more protests. They’ll no doubt continue until September 6, when the final ruling will be handed down. The chances are that López Obrador’s challenge is already doomed, but in Mexico it’s no longer easy to predict the future.
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