While the majority of the losing candidates in July’s elections have moved on to newer pursuits, former Jalisco Governor Alberto Cardenas has almost single-handedly waged an obdurate crusade to annul the result of the close contest for Guadalajara mayor. But the battle, it appears, has entered its final throes.
Just hours after Ramiro Hernandez of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) claimed victory on July 1, Cardenas of the National Action Party (PAN) was contesting his defeat. Hernandez won 38 percent of the vote to Cardenas’ 34 percent but the popular ex-governor (1994-2000) has insisted that the electoral process was tainted with multiple irregularities.
Complaints submitted by Cardenas to both state and federal electoral tribunals include “proof” that almost half of the voting returns signed by volunteers at the polling booths contained mathematical errors and that the number of ballots removed from the urns did not tally with the figures noted on the returns. He also pointed out that officials at some of the booths were replaced at the last minute by PRI affiliates employed at Guadalajara city hall.Another major irregularity, according to Cardenas, was a public meeting during the campaign at which PRI candidates met with leaders of local evangelical faiths, who are alleged to have “guaranteed” the votes of some 47,000 followers, thereby violating article 130 of the Mexican Constitution, which demands complete separation of church and state and prohibits religious organization from interfering in the election process.
After a long deliberation, five judges on the Jalisco Electoral Tribunal agreed to eliminate the results from 42 voting booths from the final tally, equivalent to around 20,000 votes. Another 10,000 votes from 48 booths that were ruled to have been “counted twice” were also annulled.
However, these “unprecedented” errors, as Cardenas called them, were deemed insufficient reasons for four of the five judges to order a vote-by-vote recount or annul the election result. So, Hernandez was ratified as the victor.
Cardenas has refused to accept the decision and pointed out that one of the magistrates on the tribunal just happened to be the uncle of Aristoteles Sandoval, the PRI’s winning candidate in the Jalisco gubernatorial election. This judge, argued Cardenas, should have been disqualified from the panel.
This week, at one of many press conferences organized by Cardenas since the election, he repeated his motives for refusing to abandon his protest. “All we are looking for is that the law be respected and our democracy strengthened. We are only seeking to uncover the truth about a process in which it is obvious to everyone that there were huge anomalies.”
Judges at a regional branch of the Federal Electoral Tribunal (Sala Regional del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion) are now hearing the complaints and will have the final say on the matter.
Hernandez will take office as mayor of Guadalajara, along with the rest of the 124 new presidente municipales in Jalisco, on October 1. Cardenas has yet to announce if he will take up his post as leader of the PAN opposition faction on the new Guadalajara city council – his right as the losing candidate.