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Lopez Obrador holding slight lead in partial recount

Election officials hand count votes Wednesday at a branch of the National Electoral Institute in Mexico City as party observers look on. Similar scenes took place in 300 electoral districts nationwide. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Jay Root and Kevin G. Hall McClatchy
Election officials hand count votes Wednesday at a branch of the National Electoral Institute in Mexico City as party observers look on. Similar scenes took place in 300 electoral districts nationwide. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

MEXICO CITY – Mexico braced itself for another election shocker on Wednesday as a nationwide recount of Sunday’s presidential vote showed leftist firebrand Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador holding on to a slender lead over conservative Felipe Calderon, who’s already declared victory in the race.

Election officials stressed that there were still millions of votes to be counted and advised against drawing conclusions. With more than 85 percent of the vote tabulated, Lopez Obrador was ahead by about 1.6 percentage points.

Analysts cautioned that there was no way to know which votes were still to be counted and suggested that many may be from districts in Mexico’s northwest, where Calderon had run strongly. Lopez Obrador’s lead had been as great as 2.75 percent during the day, but was declining as the count neared its end.

But with the possibility growing that Lopez Obrador would be declared the victor in the official count, Mexicans began to prepare for what could be weeks of uncertainty and challenges.

Mexico City’s stock market sank 4 percent Wednesday.

The announcement of a Lopez Obrador victory would be a stunning reversal of the preliminary count, which had put Calderon ahead, and would put Calderon in the uncomfortable position of challenging a vote that he’s already declared the cleanest in Mexican history.

Calderon has promised to continue the pro-U.S. economic and foreign policies of current President Vicente Fox, while Lopez Obrador has promised to adopt a more independent foreign policy and delay implementation of parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The most significant adjustment in the vote totals stemmed from the inclusion of about 2.6 million votes in Wednesday’s count that hadn’t been added to the count on election night because of various processing flaws. As a result, a preliminary count that was billed as accounting for 98 percent of the vote really accounted for only 86 percent.

The outcome of Mexico’s presidential election, the most contentious in modern Mexican history, has been in doubt ever since the polls closed on Sunday. Both Calderon, a member of the National Action Party, or PAN, and Lopez Obrador, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, declared victory.

On Monday, preliminary figures released by Mexico’s Federal Election Institute (IFE) showed Calderon with a 400,000-vote lead, about 1 percent. But that margin dropped to fewer than 260,000, or 0.64 percent, on Tuesday after IFE released another computerized preliminary count.

The recount on Wednesday played out in 300 electoral districts nationwide, as election officials and representatives of the various parties scrutinized tally sheets and, in many cases, recounted by hand the letter-size ballots that voters had dropped in boxes.