Unless the vote is close, at around 11:45 p.m. on Sunday evening we should know who will be the new president of Mexico.
More than 70 million accredited voters have the opportunity to go the polls Sunday, July 1 for an election that has largely failed to ignite the passions of the population.
In addition to selecting a new president, voters will choose 500 new representatives for the Camara de Diputados (300 elected directly, 200 by proportional representation) and all 128 senators (three per state by first-past-the-post and 32 by proportional representation).
There is a long transition period after the election. While the new Congress takes office in September, the president won’t be sworn in until December 1.
Mexican presidents stay in office for six years and cannot be reelected.
Several states, and the nation’s capital, are holding elections at the same time. Up for grabs in Jalisco is the governorship, 125 mayors’ jobs and all 39 seats in the state legislature. The mayors take office on October 1, the State Congress on November 1 and the governor on March 1, 2013.
There will be 139,000 polling places set up throughout the country. They are located in schools, institutions and cultural centers, as well as some private homes in inaccessible areas. Polls open at 8 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. 
As campaigning ground to halt (by law) on Thursday, polls gave a healthy lead to Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) but both his main challengers – Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of a leftist coalition and Josefina Vazquez Mota of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) – suggested the race would be much tighter than the experts were predicting.
No party is expected to obtain an overall majority in the country’s lower house (Camara de Diputados), due to the proportional representation system that makes this almost impossible. This has caused severe deadlock in previous legislatures and many Mexicans fear the next three years will be no different.
In the eyes of many citizens, the 2012 campaign has been the most uninspiring in recent memory. A survey carried out by the Guadalajara Chamber of Commerce showed that 75 percent of Guadalajara voters believed the campaigns were pointless. More astonishingly, 19 percent did not know on which day the election was to be held.
While foreigners might have expected President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug cartels to be the key issue of the campaign, it turned out not be as significant as many analysts – particularly those in the United States – were predicting.
The policy of using a combination of the military and federal police to go after the cartels will remain in place for some time to come regardless of who wins Sunday’s election.
Despite the high numbers of narco-related deaths (50,000-plus during the Calderon administration), many politicians privately believe that the relentless battle with the drug traffickers, backed by U.S. dollars, will eventually wear down the cartels in a similar way to how the drug empires in Colombia were eventually dragged down.
In a surprise move Wednesday, Vazquez Mota used her final campaign rally in Guadalajara to announce that she would appoint President Calderon as her attorney general if she won the election. 
This last play of the dice may have been in response to recent surveys showing that while most Mexicans are unhappy with the security situation in Mexico, eight out of ten citizens believe there should not be a change of course in the fight to reduce the power of the drug cartels.
Aside from some excitement caused when a female candidate for office in Jalisco bared all in one campaign ad, the three-month slog has been rather dull. A surprise has been the measured and intelligent contribution from presidential outsider Gabriel Quadri of the minor New Alliance Party (PANAL). Despite being the most eloquently spoken candidate, he will, inevitably, finish last, with an expected vote tally of around three percent.