Contender Alleges Mexico Vote Was Rigged

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Mexico Votes: 2006 Presidential Election
Free-trade booster Felipe Calderon is declared the winner of an extremely close Mexican presidential election. His main opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador alleges election fraud, demanding a recount.

López Obrador wants a vote-by-vote count, which would require opening sealed vote packets from more than 130,000 polling stations. Electoral commission officials have sided with Calderón's strategists, who argue that the law does not allow for the packets to be opened unless tally sheets attached to the packets appear to have been altered. López Obrador said that only 2,600 vote packets were opened Tuesday and Wednesday during a marathon official count, which shrank Calderón's lead from 400,000 votes after a preliminary vote to 230,000.

Thousands of López Obrador's supporters, many of whom had marched across the city for hours, chanted "Voto por voto, casilla por casilla" -- vote by vote, polling place by polling place -- as they streamed into the Zocalo on Saturday. Many entered the square waving the yellow flags of López Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD.

Street vendors hawked T-shirts bearing the now-ubiquitous cartoon depiction of López Obrador's face next to the word "Smile." Speakers screamed, "Vote by vote!" as their images flickered across a huge screen suspended above the stage.

x "They stole this from us," said Concepción Myen, 68, a lifelong Mexico City resident who is unemployed. "This is the worst thing that can happen to Mexico."x

Myen personifies the López Obrador target voter. She is a senior citizen and said she had looked forward to the monthly pensions López Obrador promised. She is also a single mother, who struggled to raise her child alone, and said her life would have been much better if the aid program López Obrador had vowed to give single mothers had existed when she needed it.

The anger on display in the square grows from decades of perceived indignities and a sense of persecution by a succession of ruling parties. García Trujillo, the farm worker from Michoacan, recalled feeling the same anguish in 1988 when the PRD candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, lost a presidential race that many international observers have said was stolen by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. He said he felt the same rage two years ago when outgoing President Vicente Fox's administration unsuccessfully attempted to impeach López Obrador, who was then the mayor of Mexico City.

Now García Trujillo's anger is directed at another institutional power, Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, which has a stellar international reputation but is accused by López Obrador of "manipulating" the results.

The electoral institute will cede control of the election to Mexico's special elections court, which has until Sept. 6 to decide whether to certify the results. Calderón has not waited for the elections court, and neither have world leaders. He accepted congratulatory calls on Friday from President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But López Obrador cautioned against such formalities, saying, "Right now, there is no president-elect."

After López Obrador left the stage Saturday, the crowd lingered. Someone started singing the national anthem, and countless voices joined in its rallying cry: "Mexicans, to the shout of war!"