Mexico Begins Massive Vote Recount

Mexican presidential candidate Felipe Calderon leaves a restaurant after meeting with his advisers in Mexico City, Mexico on Tuesday July 4, 2006. Calderon's rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is trailing conservative Calderon by about 1 percent in preliminary tallies, demanded a ballot-by-ballot recount in the closest presidential race ever in Mexico.(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills) (Dario Lopez-mills - AP)

MEXICO CITY -- Felipe Calderon's slim lead in Mexico's presidential race was called into question as an official recount of vote tallies showed his leftist opponent slightly ahead late Wednesday. However, Calderon insisted he had won and even offered to include his rival in his Cabinet.

With nearly 95 percent of tally sheets recounted at 300 district headquarters across the country, former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had 35.9 percent, compared with 35.3 percent for Calderon. The preliminary count completed earlier in the week had Calderon winning by 1 percentage point.

Officials from Calderon's party said Lopez Obrador was only leading because more votes had been recounted in areas where he was strongest, and they insisted the trend would not hold.

They also accused the Lopez Obrador's party of stalling tactics in states where the conservative Calderon was strongest, saying it was deliberately trying to give the impression that Lopez Obrador was ahead as the count progressed.

Earlier on Wednesday, Calderon told the Associated Press in an exclusive interview he would be willing to include Lopez Obrador in his Cabinet _ an effort to build a coalition government and avoid weeks of political impasse.

"Mexico needs us all," Calderon said. But he said he did not believe Lopez Obrador would accept, adding that the two men had not spoken to each other since Sunday's election.

Lopez Obrador insisted he was victorious and said there was "serious evidence of fraud."

Leonel Cota, president of Lopez Obrador's party, accused election officials of deliberately mishandling the preliminary count to confirm a win for Calderon, the ruling-party candidate. He said Lopez Obrador won Sunday's vote.

"We are not going to recognize an election that showed serious evidence of fraud, that was dirty from the start, manipulated from the start," he said.

When polls closed, citizens staffing the 130,488 polling places opened the ballot boxes and counted the votes, then sealed them into packages with their tallies attached and reported unofficial totals to the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE. The institute then posted preliminary results on its Web site from about 41 million ballots cast.

The sealed packages were delivered to district headquarters, where elections workers used the tallies Wednesday to add up the formal, legal vote totals.

Workers were not reviewing individual ballots except when the packages appeared tampered with or their tallies were missing, illegible or inconsistent _ including at least 2.6 million ballots likely to shrink Calderon's lead to 0.64 percent if included, election officials said Tuesday.