Thursday, July 06, 2006

Ballot dumping

From The Raw Story:

Although official tallies indicated a victory for Calderón of 0.3%, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported that 10 ballot boxes and a polling station report were found in a garbage dump in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico City, according to Reuters. The ballots came from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl, a López Obrador stronghold according to the website Narco News.

In another indication of electoral fraud, ballots were also found in a second garbage dump in the city of Xalapa, the capital of the Mexican State of Veracruz. Parts of the Spanish language report were translated by a contributor to a discussion board at the website Democratic Underground.

5 comments:

barba de chiva said...

Weary sighing at the barba de chiva homeplace.

Also: what's with all the headlines about the market reactions to the back-and-forth in Mexico ("Peso Surges on News of Likely Calderon Victory" or "Mexican Market Stalls After Obrador Shows Gains in Recounts")? How is that news? Or even entertainment? I mean, isn't it the same as saying that the people to whom we refer as "the market" are really just a bunch of hyper-reactive pussies? And didn't we know that already? That "the market" is basically just Team Italy in suits?

helmut said...

Yeah, that always bothers me too. It entirely slants election-watchers towards thinking that market-up=good=righty politics and market-down=bad=lefty politics. It takes other considerations out of the equation completely (social justice, poverty alleviation, environmental issues, etc., etc.) and turns elections into competitions between the ight kind of economics and the wrong kind where that's signalled by scrolling lights on Wall Street. Utter crap. But we tend to do this a lot, don't we? It's similar with the conflating of economic liberalization and democratization. Americans often can't tell the difference between the two.

barba de chiva said...

That's it exactly.

Not much of a comment, I guess; but I'll post it anyway.

troutsky said...

A divided Mexico is going to be an interesting Mexico, no matter who ends up "winning". That many people that close to the US who don't buy the neo-liberal line makes for real excitement.

helmut said...

Maybe, Troutsky. Surely it's a good sign that it's no longer a one-party country.