Mexico 2006

[Sam Spade]

If Mexico had elected a liberal, that might have helped raise the standard of living in Mexico enough to cut down on immigration to the US the sane way.

Whom do you call the liberal there. I know of few more illiberal personages then Lopez, by the way.

Liberal = anti-industry and growth in this situation and pro-farmer.  More importantly, anti-NAFTA. 

Most of my friends in Texas with significant Mexican heritage are extremely pro-Calderon for the reasons above.

That is, most likely to screw Mexican economy and increase the number of people who go up north.

Very true. 

It's getting to be that most of the new illegal immigrants (here at least) are from southern Mexico or from Guatamala or Belize or places even further south into Central America where the economy is still mainly rural and not doing too well.

Not many from Northern Mexico nowadays, though many of those with Mexican heritage who've done well in my area in Texas over the last 30-40 years came from that area.

[ag]

In looking at the senate trends, if the current trends hold , then the 96 senators from states (another 32 senators are distributed by national PR) will be allocated as follows:

PAN will get 2 senators (1st place) in Aguascalientes, Baja California, Campeche, Coahuila, Colima, Chihuahua, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Nuevo Leon, Puebla, Queretaro, San Luis Potosi, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Yucatan

PAN will get 1 seat (2nd place) in Mexico City, Mexico State, Michoacan, Quintana Roo, Sinaloa, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Zacatecas

Total PAN  42 senators

PRD + PT + Convergencia will get 2 senators from Baja California Sur, Mexico City, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Mexico State, Michoacan, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Zacatecas

PRD+PT+Convergencia will get 1 senator from Chiapas and Morelos

Total PRD+PT+Convergencia 26 senators

PRI+PVEM will get the remaining 28 senators from states, mostly from taking a second spot. They only lead in Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Chiapas, but they are second in most of the rest.

[ag]

Getting closer and closer - it will be very close, too close to call. Though in absolute terms the gap is still slowly growing - but very very slowly. It has just reached 300,000 votes between the top two, out of nearly 10 mln. votes counted. With 33,512 precincts (25.68%) reporting , so far it is

Calderon (PAN) 38.64%
Lopez Obrador (PRD-PT-Convergencia) 35.61%
Madrazo (PRI-PVEM) 19.05%
Mercado (Alternativa) 3.19%
Campa (Panal) 0.95%
write-ins 0.73%
Invalid votes 1.78%

Updated

[ag]

Update on the congressional district forecast. Reforma predicts the following (division of the FPTP 300 districts, not counting the 200 PR districts).

PAN 144 districts
PRD+PT+Convergencia 106 districts
PRI+PVEM 48 districts
Still unprojected 2 districts

[ag]

The PRD leader in Mexico City, Batres, has just declared on the main square that "they have data" showing  Lopez won. This is very dangerous - all sides have been under strict prohibition against talking in public or making such claims until the IFE chief Ugalde shows up at 11 (in 10 minutes). It's going to be a very long night. The candidates themselves avoid being seen.

[ag]

IFE head Ugaldo spoke at 11 PM sharp, followed by President Fox. There is no way to establish the winner from the rapid count (they did a random representative selection of precincts). They will continue posting preliminary precinct results, but no official winner declaration will be made until the full detailed recount district by district will be done. That process will start on Wednesday and will be finished "as soon as possible" thereafter. Parties are called upon to stop any celebrations of victory and maintain calm.

Quite an election!

[agcatter]

sounds like they may have a mess on their hands

[ag]

Lopez has just made a speach, in which, despite the clear declaration of a technical impossibility of determining a winner declared that he himself won by 500,000 votes. This is a very serious violation of the  electoral law here, but this way he prepares the route for an uprising if he loses.

[agcatter]

yipes - that seems pretty irresponsible considering the closeness of the election and the tense atmosphere.  Kind of like taking a match to dry kindling

[ag]

Calderon, essentially, also claimed victory. Though he did take care of using a bit more of the subjunctive. He cited the exit polls and the rapid counts which all seem to give 34-36% to PRD, 37-38% to PAN and 23-24% to PRI, though none of them are statistically significant.

The difference is, PRD has the full main square of its goons, and Lopez just has gone there. PAN has nothing of the kind. I am very worried.

[Sam Spade]

Yep, I agree with you.  Based on statistical extrapolation of the extant areas (borrowing from another site here), the numbers show roughly a 2.50%-3.00% win for Calderon.  His lead in total votes has been steadily increasing, but his percentage has steadily decreasing simply due to the numbers of votes.

[agcatter]

Hopefully, reason will prevail although desire for power tends to bring out the worst in all sides

[ThePrezMex]

Wow.. we could have our own version of Bush-Gore 2000!!!

I think it hasn't been said here that IFE's quick count is supposed to have a just a +/- 0.3% margin of error - it analyses more than 7thousand precincts.
IFE's President had said repeatedly that they would be in a position to call a winner if the first place had an advantage, obviously, of more than 0.6%. He said tonight that they cannot say this (the second scenario was that he would announce something at 1am), and that we need to wait until Wednesday when all the votes are completely counted.

On the ongoing count, Calderon keeps having an advantage of slightly more than 2percent over Lopez Obrador. A big surprise is that Madrazo of the PRI is apparently just getting 20 percent of the votes.

Both Lopez Obrador and Calderon just came out and claimed victory. Lopez Obrador said that he is going to win by 500 thousand votes. Calderon said that he's ahead by 2 percent. But IFE decided not to say anything.

Things could turn complicated and I think media has to act very responsibly. I think it's largely on the media hands how people are going to react.

[ThePrezMex]

By the way, all the TV networks and most radio stations just decided to call the night and went to sleep. The numbers will keep coming through the night, however, since IFE said that they wouldn't announce an official winner until all the votes are counted on Wednesday, they decided it wasn't worth it to wait all night.
The problem is that this preliminary count that you can see at IFE's webpage, usually stops around 95 or 96% of the votes counted - because they have missing some of the votes of the mostly isolated rural communities - by the time these votes arrive, it's usually tuesday or wednesday already. In a very close election, they need to wait for them anyway.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Calderon's lead in absolute votes is now shrinking. He's down to less than 400k.

[Cubby]

And here I am thinking Obrador and the PRD are like Howard Dean and the liberals! Its not a simple left/right divide like we have up here.

I'm glad to hear that PAN is more moderate than I assumed.

You're a bit too used to American politics then, heh.

While Obrador is somewhat similar to Dean is his campaigning style, as ag has explained before, the PRD is not some type of MoveOn insurgent party. Rather the PRD is effectively what the PRI was like for the first years of its existance, under Mexico's two party system, with PRI on the left and PAN on the right. Of course the PRI's massive political machine and grib on the country meant it won pretty much every election. The PRI moved toward more free market policies in the 70s, and then the PRD split off them as a result. The PRD aren't new Howard Dean types but rather mostly the old guard trying to get back into power. I still support them of course.

Well I'm disapointed that PRD isn't as socially liberal as I thought, but I still support them too.

Why?

Because PRD is the most socially liberal of the 3 parties (socially liberal by Mexico's standards, I saw El Crimen del Padre Amaro which showed that abortion is banned. And I feel that a vote for Calderon is a vote for the Bushies prefered candidate.

First America in 2000, then Canada and Italy this year, now Mexico.....I'm sick of these cliffhanger Elections! Whatever happened to landslide victories?

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

No election should be compared to Bush v. Gore unless it has at least one of election stealing or a margin of victory of under 0.05%.

While unlikely, it is possible that this could have a margin of victory as close as Florida 2000.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Don't forget Germany.

Obrador tanked on TradeSports but he's crawling up again and Calderon is losing his surge. Anyone on TS would be wise to purchase Obrador stock now. He's gained 6 points in the last couple minutes.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

TS has closed, with Obrador at 20 and Calderon at 73.5.

[MaC]

the 1988 was Mexico's Bush v. Gore

[Sam Spade]

The problem is that the votes right now are coming from Obrador-strong areas.  Therefore, the few people voting for him at Tradesports are either highly optmistic or don't know much about statistics (probably the latter).

The projected margin extrapolated out from the present vote totals and percentages still remaining shows about a 2.5% margin of victory for Calderon.

FYI - In Calderon states 57.48% of the precincts have reported.

In Obrador states 62.56% of the precincts have reported.

[ThePrezMex]

the 1988 was Mexico's Bush v. Gore

Not necessarily. In 1988 Carlos Salinas won 50.3% against 31.1% for the FDN (the predecessor of the PRD) and 17.07% for PAN. While there were fraud allegations, those were never fully documented - and even if there were, were not enough to change the result.
What happened is that the candidate of the FDN, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, won handily Mexico City and the Mexico State (the two largest ones) - plus Michoacan, Morelos and by some dozens of votes Baja California. The results that were first coming were those from Mexico City and Mexico State.. thus most people there thought that Cardenas had won (people in Mexico City used to believe that as things were in Mexico City they were in the rest of the country as well).
In 1994, Zedillo won by almost 14 points. In 2000, Fox won by 6.5% and now.. whoever wins seems to be by less than 1%... definitely a trend there.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Well whoever wins will have less than 40%. Like I said, Mexico needs to add a run off.

[ThePrezMex]

Well whoever wins will have less than 40%. Like I said, Mexico needs to add a run off.

I agree this time with BRTD!!!!!! a miracle! haha

[ag]

After my previous post, we had a blackout which has lasted till now (3 hours).

Here is the latest so far. Calderon lead has shrunk even in absolute terms to just about 300,000 votes or about 1% (in fact, a minute ago it was below 300,000 votes). However, at this point Mexico City has reported almsost completely (only 193 precincts out of 12,235 are left). There is still a reserve of precincts from PRD-leaning areas like Tabasco, Guerrero or Baja California Sur, but there are bigger unreported numbers of precincts from the PAN-leaning states such as Baja California, Guanajuato and Jalisco.

So far, with 101,968 precincts reporting (77.91% of the total) we have

Calderon (PAN) 37.08%
Lopez Obrador (PRD-PT-Convergencia) 36.11%
Madrazo (PRI-PVEM) 20.09%
Mercado (Alternativa) 3.02%
Campa (Panal) 0.98%
write-ins 0.73%
Invalid votes 1.95%