Cuente Los Votos!
by digby
Isn’t just wierd that whenever there’s a close election these days that the right wing always comes out on top? Now, why would that be do you suppose?
It used to be commonplace for Mexican elections to be rigged and so I guess i’m not all that surprised that this one was. What’s odd are the striking similarities between it and the recently “disputed” elections here in the US. This is just spooky:
Ruling party officials said Mr. Lopez Obrador had the lead earlier only because more votes had been counted in areas where he was strongest. They also accused the candidate’s Democratic Revolution Party of stalling tactics in states where Mr. Calderon was strongest, saying it was deliberately trying to give the impression that Mr. Lopez Obrador was ahead as the count progressed.
On Wednesday, Mr. Lopez Obrador threatened to ignore the final tally because of “serious evidence of fraud.” Leonel Cota, president of the Democratic Revolution Party, accused election officials of deliberately mishandling the preliminary vote count Sunday to confirm a win for Mr. Calderon. He said Mr. Lopez Obrador won Sunday’s vote.
“We are not going to recognize an election that showed serious evidence of fraud, that was dirty from the start, manipulated from the start,” he said.
His party has claimed that more than 18,000 polling places had more votes cast than there were ballots and nearly 800 had more votes than there were registered voters.
When polls closed Sunday, citizens staffing the 130,488 polling places opened the ballot boxes and counted the votes, then sealed them into packages and attacked a report. The electoral institute then posted preliminary results on its website from about 41 million ballots cast.
The sealed packages were delivered to district headquarters, where election workers used the tallies Wednesday to add up the formal, legal vote totals.
Workers were not reviewing individual ballots except when the packages appeared tampered with or their tallies were missing, illegible or inconsistent.
Has anybody seen Jim Baker? How do you say “divaaaahning the will ‘o the voter” in spanish?
One of the lesser known aspects of this latest serendipitous right wing squeaker election, is the US involvement. Greg Palast uncovered some intriguing evidence that we are back in the interfering in Latin American politics business — in the name of terrorism, of course:
The target nations for “foreign counterterrorism investigation” were nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Every one was in Latin America — Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico and a handful of others.
Latin America?! Was there a terror cell about to cross into San Diego with exploding enchiladas?
All the target nations had one thing in common besides a lack of terrorists: each had a left-leaning presidential candidate or a left-leaning president in office. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, bete noir of the Bush Administration, was facing a recall vote. In Mexico, the anti-Bush Mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was (and is) leading the race for the Presidency.
Most provocative is the contractor to whom this no-bid contract was handed: ChoicePoint Inc. of Alpharetta, Georgia. ChoicePoint is the database company that created a list for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida of voters to scrub from voter rolls before the 2000 election. ChoicePoint’s list (94,000 names in all) contained few felons. Most of those on the list were guilty of no crime except Voting While Black. The disenfranchisement of these voters cost Al Gore the presidency.
Having chosen our President for us, our President’s men chose ChoicePoint for this sweet War on Terror database gathering. The use of the Venezuela’s and Mexico’s voter registry files to fight terror is not visible — but the use of the lists to manipulate elections is as obvious as the make-up on Katherine Harris’ cheeks.
[…]
In Venezuela, leading up to the August 2004 vote on whether to re-call President Chavez, I saw his opposition pouring over the voter rolls in laptops, claiming the right to challenge voters as Jeb’s crew did to voters in Florida. It turns out this operation was partly funded by the International Republican Institute of Washington, an arm of the GOP. Where did they get the voter info from?
In that case, access to Venezuela’s voter rolls didn’t help the Republican-assisted drive against Chavez, who won by a crushing plurality.
[…]
Foreign — that is, American — interference in political campaigns is a crime. That didn’t stop Team Bush. However, when the theft of its citizen files was discovered, Argentina threatened to arrest ChoicePoint contractors until the company returned the tapes — and Mexico’s attorney general did in fact arrest the ChoicePoint data thieves to avoid his party from looking too much the stooge of its Washington patron. Whether George Bush gave back his copy, no one will say.
I don’t know if this Choicepoint thing helped the PAN steal the Mexican election but it certainly looks as if it’s another case of “you’d better win by a huge margin because if it’s close enough to steal, the right will steal it.”
These are the new rules. Get used to it.
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