Fraud feared in Mexico elections

MEXICO CITY, JUNE 28. Authorities have promised that Mexico's presidential election this Sunday will be the cleanest in history. But recent events suggest that at least some hard-liners in the governing party still believe that electoral chicanery can help them triumph.

In recent weeks, a member of the governing party in the state of Puebla offered to pay cash to an election official for credentials that would empower him to help supervise the local balloting.

In Yucatan, party members visited citizens randomly selected by computer to be poll watchers to discourage them from serving.

And in a Mexico City suburb, members of the governing party, known as the PRI, were discovered posing as officials from the federal agency organising the vote, leading a bogus training session on polling place procedures.

``There's been a systematic effort in many places by PRI members to create conditions that will allow them to control polling places,'' said Alfredo Figueroa, a law professor who is a member of the election agency's governing council in Puebla, the state east of Mexico City.

The President, Mr. Ernesto Zedillo, head of Mexico's electoral agency and a string of other authorities have dismissed all chances that fraud could determine the presidential winner, pointing to safeguards that include transparent ballot boxes and curtained voting booths.

Their case was strengthened when Opposition parties reported last week that party representatives would observe balloting at all 113,000 polling places.

But the Opposition candidates, several members of the agency's national governing board and prominent intellectuals are worried that in an extremely close election the governing party, with its rich tradition of vote fraud, may revert to its abiding tactics.

``The old power is resisting change,'' Humberto Musacchio, editor of a Mexican encyclopedia, wrote in a recent newspaper column. ``Many officials in our state and local electoral agencies are PRI members who very probably think in old ways and are ready to act in the old style.''

Final opinion polls last week showed the leading presidential candidates, Mr. Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the PRI, formally known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Mr. Vicente Fox Quesada of the centre-right National Action Party finishing the campaign in a dead heat.

``The number of dirty votes won't be immense,'' Musacchio added in an interview. ``But in an election like this, fraud could determine the outcome.''

Carlos Almada, a senior PRI official, said in an interview that his party had shown its democratic commitment in years of elections in which the Opposition parties had won control of 11 state governments, the Chamber of Deputies and hundreds of towns. He ridiculed the suggestion that the party could be preparing to steal votes.

``We're trying to win legally,'' he said. ``We want this election to be legitimate.'' But skepticism persists.

In a recent speech, Jorge Castaneda, an author who is a Fox adviser and a commentator on Televisa, the largest television network, outlined one fraud possibility: the party might use bribes or other methods to intervene in an election day Televisa exit poll, he said, thereby preparing public opinion for a Labastida victory that PRI poll workers would obtain through fraud in subsequent hours in rural precincts. Televisa reacted by dismissing Castaneda as a commentator.

Since its founding in 1929, the governing party has won 13 consecutive presidential votes, overwhelming many weak opponents without recourse to fraud.

But in many local elections and in presidential contests in 1929, 1940, 1952 and 1988, the party resorted to fraud, historians have concluded.

- New York Times

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