Vote Buying Could Be Deciding Factor in Upcoming Baja Elections

This year's vote purchasing practices could make or break the election for PRI, one of Mexico's biggest political parties.

TIJUANA.- Mexico's political parties in Tijuana are progressively spending less from their millionaire campaign funds given out by the country's Electoral Institute this year. That is, spending less in traditional "get out the vote" strategies.

Especially notable are the spending practices of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the oldest in Mexico, which received 7,547,165 Mexican pesos (about $415,361.99 USD) in public funds be spent on this year's local elections, and even though banners, flyers and billboards supporting PRI's mayoral candidate René Mendívil can be seen all around the city, sources report to SanDiegoRed that the party is saving a big amount of that money for the specific purpose of buying votes during election day.

Bus rentals to carry paid "supporters", food packages, monetary "incentives" and direct payments made to neighborhood leaders in Tijuana's poorest areas are only some of the expenses made over the year's by the party. If everything goes according to plan, these types of spending are usually the deciding factor during the voting process, and it seems 2016 is going to be the same.

Photo: Facebook/René Mendivil

What will this mean on June 5 for Tijuana, when the election takes place? Some of the other political parties are worried about the growing incidence of vote purchasing, and have announced different legal actions that will be pushed to avoid public officials in Mexico's northwestern region from being all elected through acts that amount to nothing more than manipulation and bribery.

Just last month, Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution(PRD) announced that a "raccoon hunt" to be held in several Mexican States to keep PRI from utilizing their known shady strategies to collect votes, both old and new ("raccoon" or mapache is a Mexican term for planted individuals who, during election times, manipulate or outright steal or fabricate votes, alter urns, vote multiple times on the same day, etc.).

Alejandro Sánchez Camacho, PRD's secretary for Strategic Political Action for the party's National Executive Committee, said that "[vote] purchasing is going to happen in a big way. [PRI] will use their acarreo [term used to describe paying people to appear at political rallies; lit. hauling] techniques, spend public money, among other actions" to inflate their numbers. Nonetheless, Baja California was not included in PRD's "raccoon hunt".

In 2015, PRI's plan to spend around 60 million Mexican pesos from public funding in Baja California through monetary "incentives" for support (to be delivered both before and after the election) was stopped by PRD, says the latter party's leader in the state, Abraham Correa.

He continues, "We stopped the PRI's and the federal government's twisted intentions through the Secretariat of Social Development (Sedesol), loading the dice against their game, using programs like the Immediate Temporary Jobs initiative. That is why they could not implement their strategy on time during the final days of the campaign last year and their candidates had no space to maneuver without the millions of pesos they were going to use in buying the people's vote."

Photo: Facebook/René Mendivil

Meanwhile, local director for the National Action Party (PAN), Enrique Méndez Juárez, foresaw in 2013 that Tijuana's XIII and XVI's electoral districts were "danger zones" for vote buying because of the number of registered voters living in the area.

"It was their neighborhood leaders who warned us about the vote purchasing that was to take place; the 'payments' would be of 1,000 pesos (about $55.04 USD)", he mentioned.

It was only a year before, in 2012, when PAN and Progressive Movement sympathizers reported finding trucks loaded with food baskets branded with PRI's logo and colors; this occurred in two separate incidents, one abandoned outside of a Walmart and the other inside of a private parking lot.

A study carried out by the country's Civic Alliance shows that, during the 2012 presidential election, 28.4% of citizens were exposed to vote purchasing and coercion tactics, out of which PRI was pointed as the most involved party in these practices.

Over 71% of the people questioned said that it was the PRI-PVEM coalition (the biggest in the country) who tried to pressure them into voting, with over 14% of polling stations involved in "hauling" practices.

With the nearest election only weeks away, it stands to be seen how Mexico's political parties change or maintain their coercion strategies against the growing number of citizens wary of them, and how this will affect the PRI's dominance on a nationwide scale.

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