Mexican leftist claims vote fraud

By Catherine Bremer and Alistair Bell

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a
fiery leftist who finished second in Mexico’s contested
presidential election, claimed on Saturday he was the victim of
fraud and called supporters to the streets in protest.

Lopez Obrador said the razor-thin election victory of
conservative Felipe Calderon last Sunday was plagued by
irregularities. He said he would take his case to a large crowd
in the capital’s vast Zocalo square on Saturday.

“We are faced with a typical case of electoral fraud in
Mexico,” Lopez Obrador told foreign correspondents hours before
the rally, where at least 100,000 people were expected to back
the popular former mayor of Mexico City.

“We are sure we won the election,” he said. “I am going to
defend our victory.”

Lopez Obrador will challenge the result in Mexico’s highest
electoral court, but Calderon is already looking presidential
after a recount showed he won by less than 1 percentage point.

President Bush and leftist Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero dealt fresh blows to Lopez Obrador when they
called his rival on Friday to congratulate him on the election
win.

Lopez Obrador said the party of Calderon and Mexican
President Vicente Fox had “learned fast” the dirty tricks often
used by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that
ruled for 71 years until Fox toppled it in 2000.

RIGGED

He said election count figures flashed over national
television had been rigged and were not consistent with the
actual vote count.

“The electronic counting system was manipulated.
Mathematically, we have the proof of how the manipulation was
done,” he said. “What was on the screen did not always
correspond to reality.”

Lopez Obrador has yet to produce concrete evidence of
fraud, and a team of European Union observers has said there
was no large-scale irregularity or vote-rigging.

The leftist, who has stayed mostly out of public view since
Thursday when recount results were released, has discouraged
violence among his supporters, many of whom remember a 1988
presidential election widely believed to have been stolen from
them by the PRI.

As several hundred people began marching toward the Zocalo
on Saturday, Lopez Obrador said his protest rallies would be
peaceful — but he would not give in easily. “This is only just
beginning.”

The left is calling for a vote-for-vote recount, instead of
a new count of polling station tally sheets as happened this
week. But Mexican law does not allow for a count of every vote.

The Federal Electoral Institute, which ran the election,
said officials from all parties, as well as a million citizens
who were called at random to help out on voting day, staffed
polling stations and few of them reported any problem.

Carlos Sedeno, 31, an architect, said another recount would
be too much.

“It’s like a vote of no-confidence in everyone who took
part in the electoral process,” he said. “There were
representatives of all the parties. It’s like doubting
everyone’s honesty.”

Lopez Obrador was a master of civil resistance in his
native state of Tabasco in the 1980s and 1990s when he shut
down oil wells and blocked the workings of state government for
weeks to protest vote fraud.

The electoral court has until August 31 to rule on Lopez
Obrador’s challenges to the vote and until September 6 to
formally declare the election winner.