MEXICO.- Over half of the votes casted in Mexico during the presidential elections last Sunday will be counted again, according to what electoral authorities announced today; a percentage way higher than was expected.
The Executive Secretary of Federal Institute of Elections (IFE), Edmundo Jacobo, informed that the 54.5% of the electoral packages that belong to 78,012 voting booths will "definitely be opened and counted again".
That surpasses entirely the initial estimate IFE's of counting again only the third part of the votes what means between 45,000 and 50,000 voting booths, something the Institute had revealed yesterday.
The 2nd counting of votes in Mexico is done for various reasons, from specifications marked by law like having a difference equal or less than 1% between the first and second place, to some inconsistencies that could be found in the voting results' registers.
The announcement was made during a press conference by the IFE just a few hours after the official counting of votes started, this calculation will be based on result's registers or voting ballots as needed in every specific case.
"By far, it is the ultimate exercise of aperture, transparency and publicity in the history of elections in this country" stated the executive secretary of the IFE.
In addition to that he informed that from the senators' election the votes to be counted again are a 61.3% of the booths and from the federal representatives, the 60.3% will be recalculated.
According to Jacobo it is expected that tomorrow at 09.10 am local time (14.10 GMT) the counting of the presidential election's votes will be completed, both for the data entries noted in the registers and the physical counting of votes.
Nevertheless, this data will be subjected to the contesting the political parties might present and which would have to be resolved by the electoral court.
The increase in the votes to be counted again arises from the agreement approved this early morning by the IFE to broaden the interpretation criteria of the law which, in turn, extended the number of votes to be counted again.
Until this moment only the preliminary results of the elections are known, they were made public last Monday and assign the victory to presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with the 38.14% of the votes.
Leftwing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who got second place in said preliminary data with 31.64% of the votes, demanded yesterday that the IFE performed again a complete counting of votes, but the decision was left in the hands of each electoral district.
editorial@sandiegored.com
Original Text : Efe Agency
Translation: Karen B. Licea
