Registration Is Low for Mexico's Absentee Vote

Numbers Signed Up in U.S. Fall Far Short of Expectations for Presidential Election

LOS ANGELES -- Only 16,000 of 11 million Mexicans living in the United States have registered to vote in what is expected to be a hotly contested presidential election on July 2, in which ballots from outside Mexico will be counted for the first time.

The number of registrations will creep up over the next month, as forms mailed by a Jan. 15 deadline arrive in Mexico, but it is still likely to be far short of the 1 million forms that were distributed internationally. The Mexican government anticipated widespread interest after intense lobbying by expatriates seeking to stay involved in their country's affairs.

"The process that was devised for casting a ballot was simply too cumbersome, too time-consuming, and involved dealing with too many government agencies to make it a usable process," said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego.

Voting is not worthwhile to immigrants whose focus has changed to their lives in the United States, said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Los Angeles. "They've left their country, their everyday struggles are very hard. They don't have time for politics," he said. "More Mexicans probably know the name of [Los Angeles Mayor] Antonio Villaraigosa than the names of the three Mexican presidential contenders."

Voter registration in Mexico is more complicated than in the United States. Mexican citizens are required to show a voter card, which many immigrants do not have, Mexican government officials said. "Smugglers destroy them so the people are not recognized as Mexicans," said Pilar Alvarez-Laso, spokeswoman for the Institute Federal Electoral, which oversees Mexico's elections. "Many people may have forgotten it or left it on purpose because it is not used in the United States."

Immigrants who lack the credential must return to Mexico to apply for one, a trip illegal immigrants are unlikely to make. Two weeks later, they must go back again to obtain the card.

Adrian Maldonado, treasurer of an organization of immigrants from the Mexican state of Nayarit in Southern California, helped organize caravans of Mexicans crossing the border to register to vote. He also manned an information table on voting, where he said seven or eight of every 10 people lost interest when they found they could not get a voter card without leaving the United States.

"Most of these people, they want to take a part of the history of our country," he said. Maldonado said his group had collected names of people who would have voted if they could, to persuade Mexican officials to change the rules for the next election.

The legislation allowing absentee balloting was passed in June after years of effort by expatriates, who are estimated to make up as much as 10 percent of the Mexican population. The new law represents a "sea change" in attitudes toward them, Pachon said, "from a disparagement, looking at them as people who turned their backs on their country, to an embracing of the reality of the situation."

Cornelius, of the University of California at San Diego, said he feared this year's poor turnout could doom efforts to improve the absentee voting process. "I think it's a virtual certainty that the low turnout this time around will be used by opponents to say this was a misbegotten project that never should have happened in first place," he said.