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PAN Fraud, but Mexico's Elections Cleaner than US

Submitted July 13, 2006 - 9:20 am by Benjamin Melançon
Fairly unrelated, but I think it is an important point to make:

Mexico's elections are more transparent than those in the United States.

This election in Mexico was stolen-- enough evidence is in to show that.

But it's possible to spot the fraud, and people are doing it, and possibly stopping the election from being stolen.

Most of this, I have to say, is due to the greater political consciousness of people in Mexico-- there are places in Ohio that should have been surrounded by angry citizens and votes protected in 2004, and though it looks like our votes are counted I try not to think how deep the political corruption must go in Massachusetts-- but millions of U.S. votes are uncountable from the outset, cast on electronic machines without a paper trail, and most of the rest are counted on private machines far less open and secure than the 130,000 sites where the actas are counted.

I make these points mostly to head off anyone who thinks the stolen election can be blamed on allegedly unique Mexican corruption-- pick your target but the blame goes to some mixture of inequality, capitalism, and government that is not limited to any one country.

And also to re-iterate how far we have to go toward democracy, everywhere.

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