Election Night in Mexico

Markings of an Election

Sunday, July 5 was Election Day here in Mexico. It was the federal midterm elections – every 3 years, the entire Congress of Deputies [the equivalent of Canada's House of Commons] gets re-elected, and every 6 years, the President is thrown into the mix. This time, the President was exempt from elimination.

Rosy and I went on over to her local polling station so she could vote. In many ways it was similar to elections in Canada – you go in to a school [or other public location] and tell them your name at the appropriate table, they look your name up in a book, check your ID, give you a sheet of paper on which to mark one X, and when you’re done the ballot gets folded and stuffed into a box. And, all the polling station workers look fairly bored.

There were a few differences though… In the book in which they look up your name, there’s also a photograph for each eligible voter – the same one from the federal ID card. Also, the ballot has full colour logos for all of the political parties. And, once you’re done voting, they take your right thumb and thoroughly mark it with a marker that smells like vinegar and stains your thumb for days. This is done so that you don’t go and vote again.

Apparently, there’s a fair bit of corruption when it comes to elections here. In some circles, if you aren’t going to vote for a specific party, it’s considered very important to make sure you at least go and nullify/invalidate your ballot by putting a giant X over the whole ballot, otherwise there’s a good chance that your ballot will end up going to PAN – the current ruling party – at the end of the day. And, if you’ve died in the last couple of years and can’t make it to the polling station to nullify your vote, you’re out of luck – unless you wanted to vote for PAN anyways.

In general, from what I understand, there’s 3 main political parties and several smaller national parties – something that occurs in countries that have some sort of proportional representation. Mexico’s Congress has 500 members – 300 elected regionally and 200 proportionally by federal results. electionresources.org has the current results of the election – though I haven’t found anywhere that says how many seats goes to each of the parties, which could be because all of the ballots haven’t yet been counted. Take a close look, and notice that “Invalid Ballots” has actually placed fifth in the election with 5.4% [1.8 million people!] of the vote. I saw on TV that, here in Puebla, that number was 7.8%. ¡Viva Anulistas!

What an exciting time! Though, not quite as exciting as when I was in New York for the 2000 elections, when we went to bed with President Gore, woke up with President Bush, and then ate lunch with President Don’t Know.

UPDATE: Actually, this just in… I was watching TV, and got the results for the 300 regionally elected members. PRI got 137. The ruling PAN got 71. PRD got 39. Verde got 50. And, PT got the remaining 3. The newscast didn’t mention anything about the remaining 200, but the table on electionresources.org should give you some idea, though the results would be a bit different once the Invalid Ballots are removed from the calculations.

SECOND UPDATE: While I was writing, a link was added to the electionresourses.org page to a post which has an estimate of the full seat distribution.