Official count says Pena Nieto won
Mexican election still faces likely challenge
MEXICO CITY – The official count of Mexico’s presidential election confirmed the victory of Enrique Pena Nieto, the candidate seeking to return the former autocratic ruling party to power after a 12-year hiatus, the country’s electoral authority reported Thursday night in a major step toward the resolution of the contested vote.
With just over 99 percent of the ballot boxes counted as of 9 p.m., more than half of them double-checked due to the possibility of fraud, Pena Nieto had more than 38 percent of the vote. In second place was leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with more than 31 percent. That gave Pena Nieto a lead of more than 3.3 million votes.
Lopez Obrador alleges Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, engaged in vote-buying that illegally tilted millions of votes toward the party that controlled virtually all Mexico’s institutions until it lost the presidency in 2000.
The accusations are expected to become the basis of legal challenges to the final vote count, which must be certified in September by Mexico’s Federal Electoral Tribunal. The tribunal has declined to overturn previously contested elections.
The accusations began surfacing in June but sharpened early this week as thousands of people rushed to grocery stores on the outskirts of Mexico City on Tuesday to redeem pre-paid gift cards worth about $7.50, which many said they had been given to them by supporters of the PRI prior to Sunday’s elections.
Simply giving away such gifts is not illegal under Mexican electoral law, as long as the expense is reported to electoral authorities. But giving gifts seeking to influence votes is a crime, though it is not generally viewed as grounds for overturning an election.
PRI spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Thursday that the gift-card scheme had been “a theatrical representation” mounted by the left. Sanchez claimed that supporters of Lopez Obrador had taken hundreds of people to the stores, dressed them in PRI T-shirts, given them gift cards, emptied store shelves to create an appearance of panic-buying, and brought TV cameras in to create the false impression that the PRI had given out the cards.