Peña Nieto is winner of Mexican election

Calderon said, “in a democracy, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats.”

Calderon was ineligible for reelection. The constitution limits chief executives to a single six-year term.

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Mexicans decided to return to the past, voting for the Institutional Revolutionary Party that once ruled the country for 71 years. Mexico’s president-elect Enrique Pena Nieto says his PRI has modernized. He's also promising to change tack on his predecessor's costly war on drugs.

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Middle class marches along in a changing Mexico: While many Mexicans and their neighbors to the north still imagine a country of downtrodden masses dominated by a wealthy elite, the ranks of the middle class are swelling.

Still, the election was a clear vote of no confidence for Calderon and his ruling National Action Party (PAN) after 12 years in power. The PAN candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota, a former education secretary, finished a distant third.

In her concession speech, hours before the official tally was released, Vazquez Mota said, “Mexico is better off today than it was 12 years ago.” She told a demoralized-looking crowd of PAN followers, “Now it’s up to us to preserve what we’ve accomplished together.”

In other races, exit polls suggested that the PRI would pick up at least one more governor’s post, giving the party control of 21 of Mexico’s 31 states.

In the megalopolis of Mexico City, Miguel Angel Mancera captured 60 percent of the vote, allowing the left to continue to run one of the largest and most complex cities in the world.

When Peña Nieto assumes the presidency in December, he will inherit the grinding, bloody confrontation against Mexico’s drug cartels that consumed Calderon’s term and left 60,000 dead.

Electoral officials praised the day’s voting as a sign of a maturing democracy. Of nearly 143,000 balloting places, only two precincts did not open to receive ballots, a record in a country with 80 million registered voters, said Edmundo Jacobo, executive secretary of the Federal Electoral Institute.

The election was not free of violence. The Mexican army deployed troops to the village of Rincon Chamula in the southern state of Chiapas to put down a confrontation between members of the PRI and the Green Party. Initial reports say three people were killed and two were wounded. The parties were members of the same electoral alliance in the national elections.

In Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city, armed men stormed into a polling station just before closing time and hijacked the ballot boxes. There were other reports of violence and intimidation.

Jacobo said officials have received 1,500 complaints — including insufficient ballots and not enough ink to mark fingers — which is less than half of the complaints registered in the last general election in 2006.

The special prosecutor for electoral crimes said he was investigating 15 incidents of voter fraud, including the arrest of a man in Veracruz who allegedly was trying to buy a voter ID for $60. In another case, a top operative of the front-running party cut in line to vote and was booed by those waiting.

A Twitter-driven student movement that arose in opposition to Peña Nieto, #YoSoy132, compiled long lists of irregularities, fraud allegations and acts of violence Sunday, and said it would challenge the outcome.

Anne-Marie O’Connor and Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

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