Posted on 07/02/2006 6:24:13 PM PDT by lauriehelds
Kieran Murray and Alistair Bell
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's presidential election is too close to call between a leftist anti-poverty campaigner and the conservative ruling party candidate locked in a tie, a respected exit poll said on Sunday.
The extremely close vote raised fears of a political crisis if any of the main candidates challenge the results and call street protests.
Pre-election polls had showed Felipe Calderon of the ruling party and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing former mayor of Mexico City, in a virtual tie. Exit polls from Mexico's two main television station and the El Universal newspaper said they could not declare a winner.
El Universal said the race was between Lopez Obrador and Calderon. Neither of the TV stations mentioned Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century.
The Federal Electoral Institute was expected to announce official results at around 11 p.m. If it is unable to call a winner, Mexico could face days or weeks of legal wrangling and protests similar to the fight that followed the U.S. presidential election in 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at today.reuters.com ...
with 65.77% in
the lead is 1.21% or 330,000
Calling it a nite.
with 66.79% in
lead is 1.14% or about 315,000
So this was what all the fear of the election was about ... a squeeker.
So fifty thousand votes off the lead in the last five percent of the count, right? Do they have a photo patrol monitoring the finishes of this kind of race?
I have no idea, but from what I've learned about Mexican politics - they should
Ignorant Ignorant Ignorant
this doesn't sound right compared to my last update
67.80% in
lead is 1.08% or 303,250
Good morning,good evening,and good night.
in the last 1.1% of returns, the Socialist gained almost 12,000???
Significant jump for Madrazo in that last update. The district(s) that likes him must have come in. The gap has been closing pretty consistently all night. At this rate, they'll have less than 1% difference at somewhere around 73 percent. Hopefully, those district percentages will stay the same and there'll be a lot of left-over Calderon votes after all the Obrador votes are counted.
last update
68.78% in
lead is 1.02% or 302,000
We can hope it was just a bulge of votes from Mexico City of somewhere and that the trend won't continue. But if the trend continues, Calderon is obviously toast -- whether legitimately or not.
"La Capital" = exactly what I was thinking.
Hasta la vista, Truman!
Mexico City is now 92% counted, compared with 68% countrywide. That might have been a bunch of votes from there but there won't be many more of those.
Calderon's percentage of the total vote has been going steadily downward all night. Obrador's has being going up at a slower rate. The first update that showed a net decrease in the actual vote margin was about an hour ago, and that's continued steadily. So, mostly what we need to hope for is that they run out of Obrador districts to count before they run out of Calderon districts. Earlier in the evening, it appeared that's what was going to happen. But, no sign of it so far.
Oh... and... have they counted the absentee ballots yet?
Here's what worries me. One, aren't the leftist states in Mexico more densely populated than the PAN states? Also, in the U.S. the last votes counted (other than late absentees) tend to come from Rats. Might be the same in Mexico?
Hopefully, more conservative areas like Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Durango (I'm guessing) have yet to report votes...?
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