Amid growing signs that a partial recount won't change enough votes to make him president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador unveiled a new victory strategy: he wants the court to throw out results from nearly 5,000 polling places.
"Annulling [the results] from these polling places would change the balance of the election, and would mean that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would be the winner," Claudia Sheinbaum, the leftist candidate's top campaign aide, said on Saturday
She said the request will be filed soon with the Federal Electoral Tribunal, which is overseeing the partial recount and must resolve all challenges to the July 2 elections by the end of this month.
PHOTO: EPA
Parties involved in the recount say elections officials have found extra ballots in some ballot boxes, and in other cases have failed to account for all blank ballots distributed to polling places. Sheinbaum said this suggests "a concerted operation" to distort the vote count in favor of conservative Felipe Calderon, who led by less than one percent in the official -- but still uncertified -- vote count.
"These criminals thought it was going to be easy, `we took his victory away and he's going to cross his arms and do nothing,'" Lopez Obrador said in the Pacific coast city of Tonala in southern Chiapas State.
"Well, no, I'm not going to just wait with my arms crossed," he said.
Elections for governor will be held in Chiapas on next Sunday, and the candidate for Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party faces a de-facto alliance between Calderon's party and the old ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Chiapas is split by religious, ethnic and political divisions, and is the home to the Zapatista rebel movement, which staged a brief armed uprising in 1994 to demand greater Indian rights.
Representatives of Calderon's conservative National Action Party insisted on Friday that no major problems or variations in the vote have surfaced with more than 75 percent of the count completed.
The polling places that were to be challenged by Lopez Obrador's party were mainly ones where Calderon got more votes, and would represent almost 4 percent of Mexico's voting places, a figure that could rise if more alleged irregularities are found in the recount, which was on track to conclude yesterday.
Lopez Obrador has said he doesn't want the entire election thrown out, but Sheinbaum said the tribunal might choose to do that, or to order a complete recount of all 41 million votes cast, rather than the current recount of 9 percent of ballot boxes with evident problems.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the