By Nancy Caouette
MEXICO CITY
Electoral authorities in Mexico announced Wednesday that they are recounting more than half of the ballot boxes from midterm elections held last Sunday.
At little more than 89,000 of the more than 149,000 ballot boxes installed will be recounted – about 60 percent of the vote in the congressional election.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) Edmundo Jacobo Molina said the entire votes in 17 of the 300 electoral districts will be recounted.
According to INE’s President Lorenzo Cordova, the actual recount is the most important since 2008, when an electoral reform introduced laws that allow for a recount.
During the 2012 presidential election, about 71,000 voting boxes to elect lower congressional members were recounted.
Mexico’s electoral law asserts that votes should be recounted when inconsistencies are reported in the final tally; if there is a difference of 1 percent or less between the first and second place finishers; if abstention votes are higher than the difference between the opponent that obtained a majority of votes or when all votes in a ballot box are in favour of the same candidate.
Representative of the Federal District Legislative Assembly of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, Pablo Gomez, criticised the high number of ballot boxes to be recounted, saying he hoped the verification was due to training problems.
The representative of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Jorge Carlos Ramirez, agreed with with Gomez. “There are serious errors in relations with the training,” he told local newspaper La Jornada, adding that there have been errors in 70,000 vote boxes that “should strongly call our attention”.
Both elected representative emphasized that 22.5 percent of poll offices were forced to use untrained workers because of an unexpected absence of volunteers.
The INE expect to formalize the results of the federal election on Thursday.
Meanwhile, thousands of teachers from the states of Oaxaca, Michoacan and the Federal District marched Wednesday in the streets of Mexico City after education officials said they would go ahead with a reform law that requires teachers to pass a mandatory test in order to keep their jobs.
Members of the National Coordinator of Education Workers union called an indefinite strike 10 days ago to challenge the 2013 public school reform law.
Last week, protesters in Oaxaca city obstructed access to fuel wells owned by state-owned Petroleos Mexicano, leaving the city without any gas for three days. They also burned electoral documents and tried to force the cancellation of the vote last Sunday, forcing officials to send federal police and soldiers to guard ballot boxes.
