Mexico's struggle against a history of spectacularly dirty elections has inspired an elaborate and costly vote-counting system meant to squeeze out fraud.
That system is undergoing the ultimate test this week in a bitter, dead-heat presidential race pitting two parties with powerful memories of being robbed in past elections. Both claimed victory on Monday and many feared political turmoil if a major party rejects the official result.
The result is a challenge to the credibility of Mexico's recently reformed electoral system -- one that has turned Mexican elections from a national disgrace into an internationally admired model.
"The Mexican system is much more transparent" than the US system, said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and a former Virginia state legislator.
Mexico has a single voter registry, a uniform photo identity card for voters and a national election law, he said, whereas "in the US, you have this crazy quilt of 50 state laws."
Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) is legally independent of the government, while in the US, partisan state officials tend to oversee the system -- something that contributed to controversy over the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
The Institute also provides taxpayer financing for political campaigns based on their vote totals in past races, an effort to even the playing field. Mexico sharply limits private campaign contributions.
Paired with the Institute is an independent Federal Electoral Tribunal, known by its initials as Trife, whose word on all election disputes is final.
Confidence does not come cheap. The IFE's budget for this year was about 13 billion pesos (US$1.1 billion).
Some 25,000 observers monitored Sunday's voting and reported few problems.
The legal count starts today, when district councils add up the ballot box reports. Actual ballots are re-counted only if the local reports are illegible or incoherent or if the package has been tampered with. By law, the councils cannot even stop to sleep before issuing their reports.
Parties have until tomorrow to allege irregularities at polling places and until early next week to dispute district counts. Those challenges ultimately go to the Trife, which has sometimes thrown out the results of congressional or gubernatorial contests, but which has never seen so tight a presidential race.
Grayson said the decision "is bound to wind up in the Trife," which has until Sept. 6 to certify the presidential winner. The new president takes office on Dec. 1.
But Grayson said the rules for the tribunal's decision are vague: "It's going to be somewhat like the US election in 2000, where you have the Supreme Court justices voting without clear guidelines."
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