•Press Release Latin America and the Caribbean Mexico World
Washington, DC — An analysis of the first partial recount of Mexico’s presidential election raises a number of questions about the electoral process, most importantly about its transparency. The study, conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), also found a number of unexplained anomalies in the data.
“Mexico’s electoral authorities should be conducting a impartial inquiry into what happened in this election, and making the results known to the public as accurately and quickly as possible,” said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of CEPR and co-author of this report. “It is clear that they did not fulfill this responsibility for the first partial recount.”
Among the problems with the transparency of the first recount, which encompassed about 2.2 percent of the ballot boxes, are:
An analysis of the recounted ballots also shows a number of anomalies. For example:
The authors note that it is possible that these and other anomalies found in the recounted data, described in the paper, have reasonable explanations. However, what is most difficult to explain is the lack of transparency in the process and the inordinate amount of time that the IFE has taken to publicize information – still very incomplete – on the recount that has taken place.
“It is unfortunate that the Federal Electoral Tribunal made a decision about which ballot boxes to recount before the results of this first partial recount were explained to the public,” said Weisbrot. “Furthermore, if this new recount is not conducted very differently than the last one, it is difficult to see how it will be of much use in obtaining a credible result.”
The full text of the report is available here.
