A culture of corruption - which is what your former favorite party, the PRI, created and what your current favorite party, the PAN has continued - does not require a "conspiracy." It only requires that there not be adequate safeguards in place to prevent those who, if given the chance, do play unfairly.

By the way, I'm sure the PRD or any other party, would do the same. I'm not arguing that the PRD or any party is pure. I've argued the opposite all year long: that there is a political culture of corruption.

To the contrary, I am demonstrating with facts that the system is corrupt and the IFE in particular is rotten to the core. However, in this case, one of the unfair equations that led to this crisis is that the nine-member IFE board excluded the PRD from having even a single representative on it. The Fox administration made sure of it when grafted the PRI and the PAN votes in Congress to put exclusively PRI and PAN members (including two Banamex executives) on the IFE board. All of this is a matter of public record.

What they created was a very flawed system with some safeguards in place that worked, others that didn't, and enough holes to drive through a million-vote fraud "ant style," which is to say, a little bit here, and a little bit there, adding up to more than a million votes.

I have not been here making arguments about algorithms or computer programs. I repeat: I'm agnostic; it could be the case or could not. To the contrary, all the evidence I've shared here has been of "old fashioned" vote stealing. In two weeks, you have factually contested only one case, of one precinct, saying it was "not improper" and now you seem to acknowledge that it was indeed improper. So far you are batting zero in any dispute over the facts.

All you have been able to do is put words in the mouths of others and then argue against what neither I nor anyone else here has said. You've been intellectually feeble from start to finish. You're embarrassing yourself in the process.

Sumate, in Venezuela, based its entire argument (in claiming fraud in 2004)  on two things: supposed exit polls and computer algorithms. And they were shot down by facts on each point. I have not used either argument here. Instead, I am relying on facts, just like I did when countering Sumate's bogus arguments in Venezuela, only this time you are playing the role of Sumate in your hysterical denial of the evidence. What I have shown you and others is:

• a pattern of miscounting and withholding of votes that benefited Calderon in the PREP results. July 2, and in the IFE official count on July 5;
• an inexplicable resistance by IFE throughout the country and especially in PAN-dominated states to allow hand counts with eye witnesses. Indeed the regional disparity between the different political parties (in which PRD did not have poll watchers or much organization in the fraud centers of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Querétaro and Nuevo Leon, among other PAN or PRI states) is one of the strongest arguments for why a recount is absolutely necessary to create public belief in the result.

(Obrador doesn't need "ample voters in those districts" - your bogus claim - to change the national result. To the contrary, just two unfairly disqualified Obrador ballots in each precinct would change the result. Or two votes added to Calderon that don't exist in the ballot boxes. Or two taken away from Obrador. Each of these kinds of vote-stealing has been proved beyond all doubt in the PREP count. And each time a closer look has been allowed, the correction has lowered Calderon's vote and raised Obrador's; proof that your random error argument is false, because if it were true, the results would not have changed each time in only one direction.)

• I have also shared my computations demonstrating how this clear uni-directional pattern, if applied nationwide, indicates the likelihood that more than one million votes were shaved from Obrador or added falsely to Calderon.
• a voter list so padded that it led to more votes than there are citizens in PAN-dominated regions.
• the illegal opening of sealed ballot boxes by IFE officials (in the Tabasco case, with a PAN operator illegally present).
• the discovery of ballots and ballot-boxes in garbage cans and dumps, all from places where Obrador won; and no such discoveries in places where Calderon won.
• I've made no zombie argument here (once more, you are drooling fantasies to distract from your absolute disrespect for the hard facts); I've argued, instead, that delinquents partial to one side were able to vote on behalf of non-existent "voters" particularly  in those regions where there was no opposition witness on election day. When someone votes in a second, third, or fourth polling place, it is a different set of people there; your flailing argument presumes, errantly, that someone would be in all places at once to notice it.

Election fraud is a blood sport. The media told everyone that the election would be razor close and that gave more motive for partisans everywhere to squeeze every last advantage. In the partisan heat of a campaign, it is human nature to commit electoral crimes in every place and time where safeguards are not in place to stop it.

In fact, in just three reports, I have offered other hard evidences not mentioned in this summary, and your silence in the face of each of them simply ratifies their factual truth.

Your problem is that you, just like the IFE, fear that a recount will demonstrate everything I've documented to be not only true, but confirmed, and then all hell breaks loose.

Your stated motive is that you fear the consequences of a full-blown citizen revolt.

I find that you also have an unstated motive that is very pendejo and related to your overglorified view of yourself and the history of how you have been a Johnny-One-Note on this theme for years. It is the following:

You have always vehemently argued the existence of a Mexican middle class that aspires to the same things that middle class gringos want. I've never argued against that. But your emotional investment in what you consider your personal discovery causes you to over-estimate its size and to invest yourself in the idea that if a "majority" elects Calderon it proves your grand theory.

The hour has arrived for a wake-up call: First, it is not your discovery. Analysts have spoken of "Wal-Mart" voters in Mexico for years. In fact, it is not a distinctly Mexican phenomenon, but, rather, one of demographic realities under capitalism.

In 1984 a very good friend of mine, UMass professor Ralph Whitehead, received much attention from journalists and pundits for his theory of "the new collar voter;" economically conservative, socially liberal or moderate, with some expendable cash, and its shifts between Democrats and Republicans in different elections. Some candidates, like Gary Hart, made that theory their gospel, and were able to make inroads by appealing to that vote. In that 1984 Democratic primary campaign, Walter Mondale was able to stop Hart's gains simply by understanding how to reach a larger group of voters that were not as economically comfortable.

During this time, some of the "new collar" political consultants (one of them being Joe Trippi, who repeated the same error in overestimating that kind of voters' numbers with the Harold Dean campaign in 2004, twenty years later) became so invested in their fantasy that the new collar voter was a majority trend that the rise and fall of their candidates (like Hart) became, correspondingly, the rise and fall of the consultants and pundits that had so attached themselves to the belief that that sector of voters was larger than it turned out to be in reality.

I remember talking with Ralph - who the pundits called "the father of the new collar voter" - regularly during those years, and how he just laughed at the way that some players tried to make franchises or reputations off his theory. He knew that this sector was no more than a swing vote in certain circumstances, and he had the maturity and judgment not to overestimate it nor become a one-hit-wonder building his entire spectacular terrain around one simple concept.

Whenever I have watched the Jules Siegel championship of Mexico's Wal-Mart voters over the years, I've found it mildly humorous. First, because the existence of this sector is nothing new, not in Mexico or anywhere else. Second, because it represents a minority, not a majority, of voters. But you have deluded yourself into thinking that this sector is somehow the dominant electorate in Mexico. Get real. It is not.

And the proof that deep inside, emotionally, whether you are conscious of your own fantasies or not, that you know it is not true is your evident fear of a recount in Mexico in 2006.

The Wal-Mart voters are not a majority. But they do have more access to the levers of corruption, as well as their role in staffing the Commercial Media where their bias, like yours, defends the interests of a minority class against that of a majority class, and thus their success this year in almost pulling off the election fraud of the century. You and your Wal-Mart voters are, demographically speaking, the Mexican Sumate. So it is interesting that you bring up Sumate, because you are behaving exactly like them: You feel personally offended by the concept of the poor electing a government that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will better serve them.

The only parallel between Mexico 2006 and Venezuela 2004 is that the defining electoral phenomenon in each case is that economic class (and, I dare say, class struggle). The poor, like it or not, are still a majority in both countries. You have been more tolerant of it in Venezuela because you don't live there. And in neither case are they going to let those who have more (or the pundits that glorify those who have more) steal from them the electoral victory that they won, in each case, by casting more votes than the yuppie minority.

To quote Phil Ochs: "I'm all for the blacks and hispanics, as long as they don't move next door, so love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal." That was the sixties, when race was the defining zeitgeist. Today the zeitgeist is one of class. And you are not alone among those who think themselves liberal but when the fight emerges on your home turf you suddenly join the fascist wave of those who oppose the most harmless and normal expression of authentic democracy, which is a full, open, transparent recount, by hand, of the votes.

It's sad to see you reveal yourself as just another one of those people. You are not at all unique in it. You're just another one of them. And with it, you have painted yourself into the same corner as the rest of the "traitors to democracy" that Vicente Fox now embodies.

You started out as Jules. But you have become Vicente Fox. If I didn't have a soft spot for "the old Jules" that we used to know, it would be pretty damn funny.

Saddest of all, you have reduced yourself to making only hypothetical arguments when you flail phrases like "But if other qualified statisticians examine the claim and find it to be false, you'll dismiss them as paid shills. Or you will go on to something else. It will become irrelevant."

And yet even without that hypothetical thing - a product only of your fantasies - having happened, it is already irrelevant to you, disregarded based on a shallow and interested hypothesis without any evidence or proof. That's called fascism, Jules; the closed mindset that is basic to authoritarianism's maintenance, where it no longer matters to its adherents that an election fraud occured, it must be denied using every feeble mental gymnastic available. Is that the legacy you really wish to leave?