When balloting stopped on the evening of July 2nd at the end of Mexico’s 2006 presidential election, the eyes of the nation turned to the two main tv networks to await the result of exit polls. Most unusually, Televisa and tv Azteca both announced they would not reveal their figures. At 11pm the chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute (ife), Luis Carlos Ugalde, appeared on screens across the country to say he would be withholding the agency’s own ‘fast result’ tally. But the ife’s ‘preliminary results’ were made available on the internet and constantly updated throughout the night. According to these data, the presidential candidate of the ruling National Action Party (pan), Felipe Calderón, initially led by five points, but with each new update the tally of votes for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (prd) rose steadily, while Calderón’s sank in equal proportion. By 1.20am, the difference was 1.4 per cent. Had those trends continued, López Obrador would have been in the lead by 4am. But the next morning, the ife announced a razor-thin lead for Calderón, ‘with 98 per cent of precincts reporting’. Here was the electoral agency’s first obvious lie: it had withheld more than 8 per cent of precincts—3.5 million votes—from its ‘98 per cent’ tally.

Over the next few days, a pattern of fraud began to emerge. Journalists, mathematicians, internet bloggers and ordinary citizens began poring over the ‘preliminary results’ and found hundreds of cases in which pro-Calderón precincts had been counted twice. Photographs of official precinct tally sheets began to circulate on the web, revealing dozens of discrepancies with the results posted by the ife: votes had repeatedly been ‘shaved’ from López Obrador—two here, four there, in some cases even 100 or 200 votes were misplaced—while Calderón’s total had been ‘padded’. On July 4th, 10 ballot boxes, supposedly guarded by the armed forces, were found in a garbage dump in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a poor area outside of Mexico City; more ballots were found in another dump in Xalapa, Veracruz. The next day, a data-entry employee at the ife’s office in Saltillo, Coahuila, resigned, saying that his boss had forced him to enter only results favourable to Calderón into the computer.

By July 5th, with popular anger building, there was still no official result. Despite the discrepancies and irregularities reported by prd representatives in numerous precincts, ife officials in each of the agency’s 300 offices around the country insisted on counting the 130,000 precinct tally sheets, rather than recounting the actual ballots in the areas concerned. In the less than 1 per cent of precincts where they did allow a recount, Calderón lost more than 13,000 votes of his supposed lead. Extrapolating this difference nationwide, López Obrador would have won the election by more than one million votes: 1,056,900, to be precise. On July 6th, however, ife chairman Ugalde proclaimed Calderón the official winner by a margin of 0.58 per cent.

On July 8th, López Obrador called a demonstration in Mexico City, where a 500,000-strong crowd of his supporters demanded a full recount, ‘voto por voto, casilla por casilla’—vote by vote, precinct by precinct. At the rally, an audio-tape recording was played of a phone conversation on July 2nd between Elba Esther Gordillo, president of the notoriously corrupt national teachers’ union, and the pri governor of the northern state of Tamaulipas, Eugenio Hernández Flores. The tape revealed that, with their party’s candidate Roberto Madrazo definitively out of the presidential race, many governors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri)—which had effectively ruled the country from 1929 to 2000—colluded with the pan and Gordillo’s own fledgling New Alliance Party to cut López Obrador’s lead. False vote counts were conducted in those precincts where the prd and other parties did not have poll watchers, primarily in the north. In pan strongholds in central and northern Mexico, official tallies in many precincts indicated more votes cast than there were voters.

Mexican television networks and other major media turned a blind eye to all these proofs of fraud, instead opting to repeat, ad nauseam, that the elections were ‘the cleanest in Mexican history’—a theme echoed by observers from the eu and oas, and the international press. The Bush Administration had rushed to congratulate Calderón on July 7th—a full two months before the result announced the previous day was due to be confirmed by Mexico’s supreme electoral authority, the Federal Electoral Tribunal (trife). But White House spokesmen rapidly back-pedalled in face of growing popular mobilizations against the fraud. A second march called by López Obrador on July 16th drew over a million people; on July 30th he was joined by an estimated 2 million. Mexico City’s central square, the Zócalo, now became a permanent encampment. Tents, blankets and policing were laid on by prd authorities, while protesters milled around in an atmosphere reminiscent of a summer festival. López Obrador took up residence in the Zócalo pending the outcome of his appeal to the trife, to whom he had on July 9th presented 36 boxes of evidence, demanding a full recount of all precincts or, at minimum, a recount in the 72,000 precincts where irregularities were documented.

The trife, the ultimate arbiter of elections in Mexico, is a panel of seven judges. It was established in 1996 as the result of reforms implemented in the wake of the notoriously fraudulent election of 1988, which had threatened the already shaky legitimacy of the system. Selected by the Supreme Court, the judges serve four-year terms, and their appointments—with a salary of $415,000, higher than that of the president—are submitted to the Mexican Congress, where the three major parties gave unanimous approval. The president of the panel, Leonel Castillo, is a former Supreme Court Justice and career federal judge, accompanied by six little-known legal academics and former judges: Berta Alfonsina Navarro, Alejandro Luna, Jesús Orozco, Eloy Fuentes, Fernando Ojesto and Mauro Miguel Reyes Zapata. The constitutional responsibilities of the country’s electoral authorities are laid out in Article 41, Paragraph 3 of the Mexican Constitution, which stipulates that they should conduct their work with ‘certainty, legality, independence, impartiality and objectivity’ as ‘guiding principles’. In the event of a conflict between the ife and the trife, Article 99 makes it clear that the trife has the final say: ‘legal challenges that are presented regarding the election of President of the United Mexican States . . . will be resolved exclusively by the [trife’s] High Chamber’.

The electoral authorities, then, are constitutionally required to provide certainty as to election results, and to assure their own impartiality. Given the widespread doubts about the validity of the results declared on July 6th, the trife had absolute legal grounds to take any measures necessary to restore public confidence in the election’s outcome. A recount was the sole means of establishing the certainty required by law. To demand one would not only have been within the trife’s power: it was its constitutional duty.