Thread by @davidluhnow

THREAD: Since the issue of Mexico's 2006 election has come up again given AMLO's refusal to recognize Biden until all the legal issues around the election are settled, I thought I'd share my experiences during that vote b/c I covered it closely.

AMLO lost the election by about 234,000 votes out of nearly 42 million - a slender 0.56% of the vote (and a similar margin to Biden's win in Pennsylvania). Most pre-election polls showed AMLO winning, but others showed a toss up, and the race clearly tightened at the end.

But AMLO and his team were so confident of victory, they had a hard time accepting they lost. They cried fraud. Many international media believed the claims at first. After all, this was Mexico, right? But as the days went on, it became clear they didn't have any real evidence.

Then journalists began understanding how Mexican elections work, and how very transparent they actually are. On election day, voters cast a hand-marked ballot at one of 130,500 polling stations manned by ordinary citizens as well as representatives from the major parties.

In all, nearly a million Mexicans take part in the process. Once polls close, volunteers and party members count the ballots together, agreeing on a final tally for each party before putting them back into a sealed box and posting the tally outside the station for public to see.

Each party representative signs a copy of the tally and keeps it, copies that parties can refer to later. The sealed boxes and a copy of tally are then taken under armed guard to the district headquarters of the national election agency, where tally is made public on internet.

It's pretty hard to carry out fraud because the process and paper trail are so transparent, and people/parties watch every step (like in the US, btw). You'd basically have to bribe all the people at a polling station, including people picked by AMLO's party.

What's nice about the whole thing is that elections in Mexico are really an area where the country has managed to learn from the past and build capable institutions. Ditto with an independent central bank. It has failed to do that with its own security forces or corruption.

Anyhow, AMLO's team had a hard time explaining how, exactly, fraud occurred. And there's a good reason. The system was designed in 1990s/2000s by AMLO's allies after the 1988 fraudulent prez election. Funny aside: the guy who did that fraud now works as AMLO's electricity czar.

I interviewed Jose Woldenberg, a leftist who headed the election agency for six years. He said AMLO's team hadn't presented valid claims of fraud. International observers said the vote was clean. The other major parties accepted the result. But not AMLO.

AMLO said he had a smoking gun: a video of ballot-box stuffing, of the kind that plagued Mexico in the past. That claim turned out to be a dud: it was a poll station worker putting three ballots into the presidential box that some voters mistakenly put in box for senate vote.

The other volunteers and parties at the station said they supervised the move and agreed. "There was no fraud," said AMLO's own party representative at the polling station. When AMLO was told his own representative said nothing untoward happened, he suggested she had been bribed.

Eventually, all these claims made their way to Mexico's top election tribunal, who ruled against AMLO. He never accepted his defeat. He declared himself legitimate president, and held a fake swearing-in ceremony.

Many in Mexico, including me, thought it would be a fatal mistake for his political career, but he held on and events played his way, particularly the return of the PRI in its most corrupt form, disgusting everyone.

Here's some of our coverage from 2006.
wsj.com/articles/SB115…
wsj.com/articles/SB115…
wsj.com/articles/SB115…
wsj.com/articles/SB115…
wsj.com/articles/SB125…