Mexico's leftist presidential candidate is asking the country's highest electoral court to overturn the ruling party's apparent victory in the nation's closest presidential race ever, as he convenes sustained mass protests to keep his hopes alive.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador claims there was massive vote fraud -- including computerized manipulation of the results -- in the July 2 presidential election.
The legal appeals don't seek to annul the election, but to force authorities to conduct a manual vote-by-vote recount. More than 100,000 supporters rallying in Mexico City on Saturday chanted "Vote by vote!"
Lopez Obrador claims that Mexican President Vicente Fox used government funds to support Felipe Calderon, the candidate of Fox's conservative National Action Party.
Fox has denied intervening in the elections, and election monitors from the EU said they found no irregularities in the count.
But the allegations strike a sensitive nerve with many Mexicans who still question whether the nation has overcome the decades of institutional corruption and fraud that favored the ruling party.
"He [Fox] dedicated himself to attacking us and ended up being a complete traitor of democracy," Lopez Obrador said.
"And if that weren't enough, the IFE, which should act with impartiality, turned into the pawn of the party of the right," he said.
Representatives for Fox and Calderon were not immediately available to comment.
The leftist former Mexico City mayor also said a previously arranged software program was used to skew initial vote-count reports -- a scenario evoking the alleged computer crash that flipped Mexico's 1988 elections in favor of the ruling party at the time.
Legal challenges were built into Mexico's elections process in recent years to help ensure clean elections, so Calderon can't be declared president-elect until the electoral court weighs allegations of fraud or unfair campaign practices. The court has until Sept. 6 to declare a winner.
Lopez Obrador's appeals focus on under-counted and null votes.
Election officials say Calderon beat Lopez Obrador by less than 244,000 votes out of 41 million ballots -- or a margin of about 0.6 percent.
But Lopez Obrador remains convinced he won the elections. He has millions of extremely devoted followers who believe only he can help Mexico's poor and downtrodden, and he views street protests as an effective means of pressuring the government and the courts.
The law allows a manual recount only for specific polling places where credible evidence of irregularities exist. The leftist's supporters say that applies to at least 50,000 of the approximately 130,000 polling places.
Calderon says the that vote was clean and has taken congratulatory phone calls from US President George W. Bush and the leaders of Canada, Spain and Colombia, among others, despite Lopez Obrador's plea for foreign governments to hold off on recognizing the result.
"We are going to ask that they clean up the elections. We are going to ask that they count all the votes, vote-by-vote, poll-by-poll," Lopez Obrador said, claiming the election fraud was worse than under the Institutional Revolutionary Party which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000.
Lopez Obrador provoked groans of disappointment from the crowd packed into the capital's central plaza on Saturday when he told them not to block highways.
"This has been and goes on being a peaceful movement," he said. "We are not going to fall for any provocations."
But Lopez Obrador has repeatedly evaded questions about whether he would accept court decisions that go against him, and said "a victory for the right is morally impossible."
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