Andreas Schedler
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ing just a single vote from López Obrador at fewer than half the 130,231 polling stations. The PRD’s fraud allegations rested on that party’s straightforward reading of missing or excessive ballots as evidence of stolen or added votes. A hypothetical manipulation of ballot numbers alone, however, has no bearing on the vote count carried out by polling-station officials. To alter actual results, fraudsters would have to tamper physically with the contents of ballot boxes, either adding or removing ballots. We have zero evidence that this happened on election day. Still, the numerous discrepancies in ballot accounts provided justification for López Obrador’s demand of a full recount as well as for the partial recounts that the IFE and the TEPJF decided to carry out.
Imperfect Remedies The Mexican electoral process contains two stages that offer opportunities to clean up messes of the sort that polling-station ballot accounts predictably leave behind: the district-level tally and the Electoral Tribunal. Mexican election laws, in contrast to those in many other democratic countries, do not provide for full recounts in close elections.10 The laws do, however, allow the possible reconciliation of tallysheet discrepancies during the district-level vote tallying that takes place during the week following a national election. At this stage, election officials are obliged to perform recounts of the ballots from those polling stations whose tally sheets contain inconsistent, incomprehensible, or missing data. For anyone with doubts regarding the results, this would be the legally prescribed time to spot and correct problems through the recount process. Unfortunately, the IFE’s top authorities failed to seize the moment during the critical week of July 3 through 9. Instead of publicly stressing the Institute’s full readiness to address any doubts or complaints that party representatives might raise, IFE officials contented themselves with merely restating the formal rules in an internal communiqué. Accordingly, district councils followed their custom from previous elections and paid little attention to discrepancies in ballot accounts, while everyone moved through the process in a hurry. In one dramatic day, officials unsealed and recounted the data from 2,864 polling stations. At those where Calderón had won, the recount reduced his margin of victory by an average of 2.9 votes. Where López Obrador had won, the recount decreased his lead by an average of 7.5 votes. Since two-thirds of the recounted votes belonged to polling stations carried by the PAN (as the PRD had refrained from demanding recounts in its own strongholds), the overall adjustment in the two candidates’ respective vote totals was minimal.11 The second chance for remedial action comes from the TEPJF. In the case that the PRD and its coalition partners brought before that panel,