In Mexico, 2.5 Million Missing Votes Reappear

Here is how the day's "hard count" of official (not preliminary) vote tallies has gone since noon today. Below, I share seven snapshots of the results, which have remained consistently with López Obrador in a healthy lead, now with 64 percent of the actas counted...

12:02 p.m.

25.38% of precinct reports counted:

Obrador: 36.98
Calderon: 34.39
Madrazo: 22.03
Mercado: 2.76
Campa: 0.92

Margin: Obrador up by 2.59%

1:33 p.m.

40.05% counted

Obrador: 36.99%
Calderón: 34.41 %
Madrazo: 21.99 %
Mercado: 2.78 %
Campa: 0.92%

Margin: Obrador up by 2.58 %

2:33 p.m.

50.16% counted

Obrador: 37.15 %
Calderón: 34.39 %
Madrazo: 21.88 %
Mercado: 2.76 %
Campa: 0.92 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.76%

3:06 p.m.

54.92% counted

Obrador: 37.11 %
Calderón: 34.56 %
Madrazo: 21.77 %
Mercado: 2.76 %
Campa: 0.92 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.55 %

3:42 p.m.

60.07% counted:

Obrador: 37.09%
Calderón: 34.56%
Madrazo: 21.79%
Mercado: 2.75%
Campa: 0.92%

Margin: Obrador up by 2.53%

4:01 p.m.

62.61% counted:

Obrador: 37.09%
Calderón: 34.53%
Madrazo: 21.83%
Mercado: 2.75%
Campa: 0.92%

Margin: Obrador up by 2.56

4:13 p.m.

64.34% counted

Obrador: 36.98%
Calderón: 34.56%
Madrazo: 21.92%
Mercado: 2.74%
Campa: 0.92%

Margin: Obrador up by 2.42%

The fluctuation of margin between Obrador and Calderón has, in these six reports of the data directly from the 300 recount locales, been limited to 0.3 percent. López Obrador has remained between 36.98 and 31.15 percent. Calderón, between 34.39 and 34.56. It will be highly suspicious if suddenly, if the final third of the count suddenly starts spitting out numbers outside of that general fluctuation.

So, what happens if, at the completion of this process, López Obrador wins the preliminary hard vote count by – if current trends hold – about 700,000 votes?

As demonstrated above, the first 64 percent of the official results was within a very slim fluctuation of 0.3 percent difference between the two leading candidates.

But now look at the pattern over the past 4 hours... In which, with 84.84 % of the precincts counted, López Obrador's lead has lessened from 2.42% to 1.79 percent.

My guess?

The IFE and the Fox administration will not proclaim Obrador the winner.

In the final 15 percent of the precincts to be counted, they will miraculously find the votes to put their boy Calderón in the lead. Think I'm cynical? You bet.

In the coming days we'll put this activity on a bar graph. It's precious, in a sick kind of way. The M.O. exactly matches that of Sunday night, in which for the first 70 percent of the tallies Obrador is on a fixed trajectory and then, wham!, he suddenly sinks. And it is happening here again. The only difference is that Obrador was coming up from behind in the preliminary results, while he maintained a solid lead in the precinct total counts. But in the final stretch, those whacky IFE computers - all rights reserved, Hildebrando S.A. de C.V. - are at it again!

I'll make some more observations below...

4:44 p.m.

65.68% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.91 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.6 %
Roberto Madrazo: 21.94%
Patricia Mercado: 2.73 %
Roberto Campa: 0.93 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.31%

5:01 p.m.

69.01% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.81 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.64 %
Roberto Madrazo: 21.98%
Patricia Mercado: 2.73 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.17%

5:31 p.m.

71.46% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.87 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.56 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.02%
Patricia Mercado: 2.72 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.31%

5:31 p.m.

-72.86% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.86 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.55 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.03 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.72 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.31%

5:31 p.m.

(I don't know why three increases all occurred at the same minute, at 5:31... I have read that the IFE computer has "crashed" twice to day.)

-73.58% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.85 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.57 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.02 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.72 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.18

6:12 p.m.

75.08% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.78 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.62 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.05 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.72 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.16%

6:25 p.m.

76.46% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.76 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.62 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.07 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.06%

6:42 p.m.

77.93% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.73 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.63 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.09 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.1%

6:57 p.m.

79.21 counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.71 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.65 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.1 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.06%

7:09 p.m.

80.12% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.69 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.67 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.11 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 2.02

7:22 p.m.

81.04% counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.65 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.68 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.12 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 1.97%

7:43 p.m.

82.46 % counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.6 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.71 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.15 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 1.91

8:11 p.m.

84.13 % counted

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.52 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.74 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.19 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 1.78%

8:24 p.m.

84.84 % counted

Candidatos Presidenciales:

Andrés Manuel López Obrador: 36.51 %
Felipe Calderón: 34.74 %
Roberto Madrazo: 22.2 %
Patricia Mercado: 2.71 %
Roberto Campa: 0.94 %

Margin: Obrador up by 1.79%

Commentary:

Manuel Camacho Solis of the Obrador campaign told reporters today that the IFE held back Calderon precincts until the very last, and that he expected the results to shift.

A PAN spokesman accused the PRD of slowing down the counting in Calderon country.

The PRD - although in the lead for the entire day - still insists it wants a full hand-count of all the votes.

The PAN - although trailing all day - still opposes a full hand-count.

Here is another indication of suspicious activity: the tallies for Madrazo, Mercado and Campa have remained the same ALL DAY. Even when Obrador's numbers began to shift, theirs did not. Spooky, eh?

Meanwhile, if after watching a consistent result for the first 70 percent or so of the tallying, the public finds it suspicious that the tallies are suddenly shifting, watch for that pain and rage to explode very, very shortly.

Check this out...

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/360380.html

It reports that IFE employee Loar Cibac Pereira Sánchez in one of the electoral agency's regional offices (in Saltillo, Coahuila) confirms that on Sunday night, as he was entering election results into the IFE PREP system computers, his boss, José Luis Fernández Mier, "ordered him to enter the vote tallies favorable to Calderon Hinajosa and threatened to transfer him to a rural office if he didn't obey."

"The young man said that a strange blackout occured in the district IFE office, and when the light returned the results in the computer had changed and the PAN was then in the lead. He also said that when he was leaving alone he found some garbage cans outside the building with blank precinct and computer forms."

Fraud or no fraud, the way that Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has gone about this recount of vote tallies is amazingly irresponsible. With 89 percent of the tallies counted, the IFE announced that it would recount four northern states (Baja California del Norte, Nuevo León, Sonora and Sinaloa) last. The PAN won each of these states.

Throughout the day, López Obrador has been leading the recount, but I haven't seen any reports of where these vote tallies were coming from. Now that Lopez Obrador's lead has narrowed to just 1.28 percent, the IFE tells us (as it goes into recess) that these four northern states are the last to be counted. With these four states to be counted, it's virtually guaranteed that Calderón will end up in the lead. Judging from the PREP results, Calderón stands to pick up around a million recounted votes from these four states.

Again, fraud or no fraud, the IFE will have nobody to blame but itself when López Obrador's supporters are incredulous that Calderón has taken the lead at the end of the recount. It's almost as if the entire recount was set up as a cruel panista joke.

Hey, I posted a new discussion on media coverage at Mexico: Reuters & Bloomberg concede Obrador has a 1.5% lead.

Two days ago the IFE claimed that candidate Felipe Calderon enjoyed a 1.4 percent lead in the presidential race, with 98.5 percent of the vote, it said, counted. At all times in the IFE preliminary counting process Calderon was in the lead.

Yesterday, they found 2.5 million votes and Calderon's lead shrunk to .6 percent.

Today, during the hard count of precinct results, and the opening of a very small percentage of ballot boxes, more than 94 percent of those hard counts have been tabulated and while Lopez Obrador has been in the lead all day, the last five percent of votes counted will no doubt push IFE's favored candidate Calderon into the plus column when around 97 or 98 percent of the vote is counted.

I estimate - based on IFE's behavior and statistical manipulations on Sunday and Monday - that this "recount that is not a recount" will claim Calderon the victor by .2 or .3 points (80,000 to 120,000 votes, or less than one per each of the 130,000 precincts).

That would still represent a halving of the margin the IFE claimed Calderon had yesterday.

At this rate, the Hidebrando Overlords at IFE will HAVE to rush to judgment and declare Calderon the "winner" late tonight or in the dawn hours because, since each day more votes are found for Obrador, they can't let this drag on even one more day.

So, in the morning, we will likely awaken to "news" that IFE declares Calderon the "winner."

At that point it goes to the high Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE), the judicial arm of the elections system, a body that never met a fraud it didn't like. The plea filed to those judges will be that ALL the ballots be recounted. But there is little hope in the courts to overturn a fraud. It has never happened on a national race.

And everyone knows that justice won't be found from a fraudulent system. But there is another path, below a.nd to the left, toward justice, and the story will take a very dramatic turn very shortly.

I'm not going to wait up all night and pretend there is any chance that legitimacy will prevail. I'll rest up for the battle ahead. See y'all tomorrow.

-a

Al,
It looks like you are going to be proven correct.
Reuters just posted, "A Harvard-educated conservative, Calderon had 35.8 percent support with results in from 99.5 percent of polling stations. Although he was just 0.44 points ahead of Lopez Obrador, he continued to pull away as the last votes trickled in. "

... that the Democratic machine always holds back the vote count from Chicago until they see just how many votes they have to manufacture.

Holding the precincts you have the most control over until last seems like a standard procedure in perpetrating fraud.

But with an official margin this thin it doesn't look like there's any question AMLO would have the most votes if they were all counted-- and again the moral authority of all those excluded from voting at all, AMLO supporters on balance, makes it all the more imperative that all the votes do get counted.

Wow, this comes as a bit of a surprise.

From the New York Times July 7 editorial, entitled "A Recount in Mexico":

"...there are enough problems to warrant a complete recount. Some polling stations that have recounted their ballots have found that the votes were misrecorded on tally sheets. The earlier discrepancies appeared to largely favor Mr. Calderon, in at least one case mistakenly awarding him hundreds of extra votes. The I.F.E. [Federal Electoral Institute] cannot legally order a recount of the entire presidential election. But the Federal Election Tribunal, an independent panel created to handle these kinds of disputes, could. In previous races, it has even gone so far as to call new elections in the states of Tabasco and Colima..."

A Recount in Mexico

In The Winner Is... The Other Campaign, Al Giordano wrote (in a parenthetical phrase, no less) that "foreign capitalists are much more sanguine" about an AMLO victory.

I hate to be cynical, I really do, but in the NYT editorial I see more a confirmation that (some) foreign capitalists think Lopez Obrador can do a better job managing Mexico for the business class than Calderon can, than a new commitment to authentic democracy by the grey lady.

But unfortunately, plenty of U.S. and foreign capitalists don't even want the Bush administration.  Don't get me wrong, they individually love his near-end of taxes on the wealthiest.  Capitalists surely have absolute faith that no labor, environmental, or economic regulation will cost them a cent in profits so long as Bush's crew are in power.  But there's clearly a nagging sense that global warming and losing wars might be bad for business, to say nothing of the leftward resurgence world-wide that the Bush regime has been unable to stop, in general, even in 'the U.S. own backyard'.

So who will win out in Mexico?  The local big capitalists, at least a few of whom showed their finesse in suing Narco News, seem unlikely to move from their position.  And the Bush regime, likely to be in power for another two years even without another Reichstag fire, would seem to be a more important voice of U.S. capitalists than the New York Times, whatever the majority opinion.

And there's that largely anonymous group of businessmen at MATT.org, which put on such a show of being non-partisan and "diverse" in its opinions in the months since it was founded-- apparently, all so some might find it credible when it came time to show it's true colors, which Giordano pegged cold.  Their headline today (and for all I know, since Sunday) is sickening:

MATT Was First To Predict!
Felipe Calderón
Mexico's Next President
Will There Be Democracy or Revolution?

They have published less than 20 articles since their inception, so their blatant disregard for all that balance they announced in so many words is completely blown away by their behavior now, and if nothing else good comes of this election, at least MATT's credibility is destroyed good and early.

MATT will probably be referred to in propaganda to get the U.S. to accept Calderón as "Mexico's choice" but the real question is who does the the final election tribunal represent, and, therefore, just how ungovernable does Mexico have to become to make them grant a full recount?

AMLO, by tacking very centrist in the last part of the campaign, seemed to want to assure Mexico's (and foreign?) elites that he would be a good steward of their wealth, even while "putting the poor first" rhetorically.  I may be misreading Mexico, and it is conservative enough that moving centrist was a real bid for more votes.  But in the United States Al Gore won in 2000 because in the last two or three days of the campaign he discovered his inner populist, in my opinion.  (That Al Gore won the popular vote and the state-by-state vote is not my opininion, incidentally, it is fact; the "in my opinion" part is that the reason he won is the shift to populist rhetoric.)  Gore won not because he swayed the opinion of people who had already rearranged their schedules to get to the polls that working Tuesday, but because his genuine acknowledgement of the troubles working U.S. citizens faced gave more people a reason to go out and vote for him.

In the same sense, I think if AMLO had given the poor more reason to believe he was sincere about fighting on their behalf (and simply sticking to those original points alone would have helped), he would have gotten many more people to vote for him (those potential voters that aren't cut off at 750 per precinct because they're working far from home, that is).

But winning an election is not, in what was already becoming Bush's America even in Gore's day, the same thing as taking, or keeping, power.

As one donor to the Fund for Authentic Journalism always writes with his check, "to the barricades!"

Ben writes:

Their headline today (and for all I know, since Sunday) is sickening:

MATT Was First To Predict!
Felipe Calderón
Mexico's Next President
Will There Be Democracy or Revolution?

Al comments:

That takes a certain amount of chutzpah since, as my June 30 report quoted that same Matt.org website, the organization said exactly the opposite, that it was a "two horse race" between Obrador and Madrazo, with Calderon out of the race... To claim now that they had predicted the opposite takes the art of bullshit to new levels.

Interestingly, despite the organization's current dialectic of "democracy or revolution?" (ahem, what democracy ever happened without a revolution first?), Matt.org and its caudillo Lionel Sosa's attempts to skew the argument aren't working with its own participants. This online poll over there, asking if Obrador should back down from fighting the official results already had more than 1,000 voters as of 5 p.m. The result so far? 82 percent say Obrador should keep fighting.

Check it out!