STE WILLIAMS

Mexican election loser and Anonymous say vote was ‘fraudulent’

Mexico’s defeated leftist presidential candidate has claimed his country’s election was “fraudulent”, a claim supported by the local chapter of Anonymous.

Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), declared victory late on Sunday after official results showed he landed 38 per cent of the vote. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), got 31 per cent while Josefina Vazquez Mota, of the conservative National Action Party, got 25 per cent.

Ahead of the election, hacktivist group Anonymous claimed to have identified a number of irregularities in the election process that would favour Peña Nieto. Mexican Anons claimed they broke into the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) website and uncovered evidence that the election’s organisers pre-issued a number of ballots in favour of the PRI. The action was a continuation of previous operations in support of Mexico’s YoSoy132 student protest movement.

Analysis of the data Anonymous found on the IFE’s servers can be found in this blog post.

Lopez Obrador condemned Sunday’s vote as “filthy” during a press conference in Mexico City. “We cannot accept a fraudulent result, nobody can accept that,” he said, AFP reports.

The PRI bought votes and broke campaign spending limits as well as enjoying the advantage of biased media coverage, Obrador also alleged. The former mayor of Mexico City lost the 2006 presidential poll by just one per cent and subsequently organised protests that blockaded the Mexican capital’s main commercial boulevard for months. It is unclear whether or not similar, but ultimately futile, protests may occur this time around.

Unconfirmed reports in the Mexican news suggest some citizens were offered pre-paid grocery vouchers as bribes in exchange for voting cards, but it’s unclear how widespread this practice may have been.

About 80 million Mexicans were eligible to vote in the weekend’s elections to choose members of Congress and local politicians as well as a new president. If upheld, the presidential election results would see the PRI return to power, a party that governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years before losing the presidential election in 2000. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/04/mexico_election_vote_rigging_anon/

Comments are closed.