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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Giant recount ordered for Mexican election
Dario Lopez-Mills / The Associated Press Archives Ballot boxes await their recount in Mexico City Wednesday. (CP)
MEXICO CITY -- Mexican electoral authorities said Wednesday they are recounting more than half the ballot boxes used in the weekend's presidential election after finding inconsistencies in the vote tallies.
Of the 143,000 ballot boxes used during Sunday's vote, 78,012 will be opened and the votes recounted, said Edmundo Jacobo, executive secretary of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute.
Electoral officials expect the recount plus the official overall count on the presidential vote to be ready by Sunday, said Ana Fuentes, an IFE spokesman.
Mexico's electoral law states votes should be recounted if there are inconsistencies in the final tally reports, if there is a difference of one percentage point or less between the first and second place finishers or if all the votes in a ballot box are in favour of the same candidate.
With 99 per cent of the vote tallied in the preliminary count, Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, led with 38 per cent of the vote. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party had 32 per cent.
Authorities also will recount 61 per cent of the ballot boxes in the vote for Senate seats and 60 per cent in the vote for the lower house of Congress, Jacobo said.
The presidential front-runner expressed confidence Wednesday about the recount. "I trust that the final tally will be consistent with the preliminary count," Pena Nieto said.
Lopez Obrador refused to accept the preliminary vote tallies. He said the election campaign was marred by overspending, vote-buying and favourable treatment of Pena Nieto by Mexico's semi-monopolized television industry.
The leftist candidate said Tuesday his team had detected irregularities at 113,855 polling places, and called for a total recount.
Feeding suspicion of large-scale vote-buying were scenes of thousands of people rushing to grocery stores this week to redeem pre-paid gift cards they said the PRI had given them ahead of the election. Several told reporters they had been told to turn in a photocopy of their voter ID card in order to get the gift cards.
Under Mexican election law, giving voters gifts is not a crime unless the gift is conditioned on a certain vote or is meant to influence a vote. However, the cost of such gifts must be reported, and cannot exceed campaign spending limits. Violations are usually punished with fines, but generally aren't considered grounds for annulling an election.
Shoppers nearly stripped some shelves at a Soriana store in the poor district of Iztapalapa and officials in Mexico City, which is governed by Democratic Revolution, ordered at least one branch of the chain closed for alleged violations of safety codes.
Both the PRI and the supermarket company denied any irregularities.
"Neither the PRI's executive committee, nor Enrique Pena Nieto's campaign has contracted any service from the Soriana grocery store chain," PRI spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 5, 2012 A7
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