Long History of Vote Fraud Lingers in the Mexican Psyche

Letter From Mexico
Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: September 7, 2006

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 6 — Felipe Calderón was named the next president of Mexico on Tuesday by a tribunal that confirmed that the vote was basically free and fair. Yet a significant slice of the voting public still believes that the election was marred by fraud and that the country’s electoral institutions are corrupt.

To some extent that is because his leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has waged a fiery campaign to persuade his supporters that his narrow loss on July 2 was part of a broad conspiracy between President Vicente Fox and business leaders to deny him victory.

But why do between a quarter and a third of voters, according to recent opinion polls, agree with him?

One reason is history. After decades of one-party rule sustained by fraudulent elections, many Mexicans still deeply distrust their institutions and courts. But it is also because Mexicans have a very different notion of electoral fraud than voters in the United States, a notion that goes beyond stuffing ballot boxes.

That is not to say that there was no hint of conventional fraud.

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