Your account of the facts is not accurate, and is apparently unaware of Mexican election law. It is illegal to open one ballot box and remove ballots to place them into another. Even if, as the authorities claim, the party representatives on the scene all approve it, it is still illegal.

Furthermore, your extrapolation of a suggestion that some "poll watchers" by one party could be corrupted (are you arguing that they are always uncorruptible?) into a universal claim - "that," in your words, "his party is so corrupt that its own militants sold out the election to the opposition because they were bribed?" - is schoolyard stuff, unworthy of serious discourse.

It is absurd, first, because the many evidences of dishonest vote counting and other frauds are not mainly in the realm of corrupt or inept poll watchers. What you are trying to suggest - that one possible incidence can therefore be applied nationwide - is intellectually dishonest. To, beyond that, claim that this particular kind of corruption is what "sold out the election" nationwide - shunting aside or wishing away all the other kinds of hard proofs of various patterns of different kinds of fraud - is also knowingly false.

This growing news story and scandal is not about whether PRD or PAN or PRI, or Obrador or Calderon, ought to be president. It is, rather, about whether the authorities of IFE responsible for conducting honest and transparent elections are, in fact, electoral delinquents and changed the tally illegally.

I will repeat the documented facts, particular to Guanajuato, that your smokescreen attempts to cover up with rhetorical games: In the electoral cesspool that is Guanajuato, 640 of 6122 precincts showed serious enough irregularities to provoke election-night challenges. During the July 5 first hard count, the corrupt Guanajuato elections authorities allowed only eight of those 640 precinct ballots to be counted by hand. The shift in just those eight districts lowered Calderon's margin of victory by 253 votes - about 31 votes per precinct. Had the other 632 challenged precincts been counted with similar results, that would lower Calderon's margin by more than 19,000 votes. If all the state's 6,122 precincts were to be recounted and were to show similar tampering, Calderon would lose 189,782 votes, or 77 percent of his alleged national margin of victory, in just one state with just five percent of the electorate.

Guanajuato has always been an electoral cesspool. It was when the PRI governed (cause Vicente Fox and his PAN party to challenge the 1991 gubernatorial results with tactics that included highway blockades and the taking of the international airport and government buildings, including the halls of Congress), and the change in parties has not ridded Guanajuato of its culture of electoral corruption.

Oh, and you must have missed this morning's revelations by national university investigators that more votes were cast in Guanajuato then there are voting-age citizens in the state: 301,933 more voters than all the 18-and-above aged citizens in all of Guanajuato. This is based on the hard data of the government census agency known as the INEGI.

This blockbuster disclosure gives gale force to the accusations that the IFE voter list - known as "el padrón" - had been corrupted not only to remove 900,000 voters days before the election without explanation (leading to many elderly ladies and gents in PRD strongholds like Mexico City, in particular, arriving to vote but finding they had been erased by IFE from the voter rolls), but also to Marcos' report that the names of Mexicanos who had gone to the United States, as well as dead people, were used to cast votes in their absence (Guanajuato, of course, is one of the states that has lost the highest percentages of its population to immigration toward the other side). This also corresponds with the most interesting disclosure that the ink used this year to stain thumbs of those who had already voted was not indelible, leading even TV Azteca and Televisa news anchors to demonstrate, on TV, on election day, that they had successfully washed off the "indelible" ink shortly after voting.  Vote early and often, indeed.

In any case, your wishful hopes and smokescreens meant to put the brakes on a full recount are crashing down on the reefs of reality. That you ally yourself with the efforts by those in power to prevent that recount will not prevent it from happening. It is coming soon to 130,000 precincts, some of them near you. And then we will all be able to see if the ballot boxes have remained unsealed and if IFE counted the votes correctly. Then we will see who has been truthful and who has been bullshitting. I have no doubt which of us is on the right and honest side of history.

That said, thank you for posting your opinions here. Errant though they are, you have free speech (and an ample readership) on the Narcosphere, including the right to be wrong. But to claim that one (still improper, despite your flailing claims) incident can be therefore be extrapolated to claim that all has been proper is as absurd as claiming that one errant Narcosphere entry - yours - proves errancy in all the others. Your claims are in error. The larger context and body of work here disproves them.

Finally, it is this kind of stonewalling routine by IFE authorities, the Commercial Media and, now, you that is fomenting the social unrest to come, to an extreme way beyond what a single candidate or his party would otherwise be able to convoke. You, and those in the same line of argument, are building your own Frankenstein monster. Have fun when it awakens.