The Federal Electoral Tribunal's pronouncement of Felipe Calderón as the winner of the July 2 presidential elections in Mexico represents more a missed opportunity than the end of a contentious electoral cycle. Regardless of one's preferred candidate, there is little cause for celebration.

Contrary to its depiction in the U.S. media, the election — and in particular the campaigns leading up to July 2 and the multiple vote counts afterward — was marred by irregularities and even incidents of fraud, all of which have been documented by Mexican electoral watchdog groups, analysts, and Mexican and international observers. I was a member of one of those teams of observers.

In the months before the elections, state officials of all three major parties used public assistance programs to buy votes. I interviewed the director of a nonprofit organization who was kidnapped after he refused the request of National Action Party legislators to divert federal funds for his rural housing program to their election coffers.

Alianza Civica, Mexico's oldest electoral watchdog group that had more than 2,000 observers in the field on Election Day, reported illegal coercion of voters — principally by the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, but also by the other two major parties — in 11 percent of the polling places they visited.

What's more, almost 20,000 poll workers didn't show up on Election Day, and the Federal Electoral Institute has yet to make public the names of those who replaced them, despite allegations that they were systematically replaced by members of the highly corrupt National Teachers Union.

But some of the most serious doubts about the election arise from the various vote tallies, including the court-ordered partial recount. As numerous analysts pointed out, the real-time count on Election Day, known as the PREP, was plagued by anomalies such as vote totals not matching percentages reported, and oddly behaving differentials between the two leading candidates as the numbers came in. PREP data shows a staggering 49 percent of all precincts suffered from missing or extra ballots.

Although detailed results of the partial recount have not been made public, one of the rare points of consensus between the National Action Party and the Party of the Democratic Revolution is that 62 percent of polling places where ballots were recounted contained mathematical errors (though they disagree on the magnitude of those errors). I saw some of the raw data from the recount, and the difference between likely human error and severe anomalies was surprisingly clear. A column of net changes for candidates between the district count and the recount contained lots of +1s, -2s and +5s. Fine. But net changes of 233, 100 and 172 for a candidate in a single polling station (in some cases changes of more than 100 percent of the number of votes cast), as there were in District 3 in the state of Jalisco, smack of something else.

So, if the preliminary count on Election Day, the PREP, was fraught with anomalies; the official district count only retallied 2 percent of the votes cast; and more than half of the ballot boxes opened in the partial recount contained varying degrees of mathematical errors, why didn't the Tribunal bring clarity to the matter with a full recount?

Most legal scholars agree that the magistrates opted for a very narrow interpretation of the law when they decided to recount votes from only 9 percent of the voting precincts. Whether their decision reflects personal career considerations, political calculations or simply their interpretations of the law is the subject of intense speculation.

What's clear is that the Tribunal, when it passed over the option of a full recount, missed its one opportunity to salvage from the imbroglio both confidence in the results and much needed legitimacy for the new president. A full recount would have provided legitimacy for the winner and closure for the loser — two key ingredients for a peaceful and propitious post-electoral period — regardless of who came out on top. But that opportunity, and the rosier prospects that accompanied it, is now gone.

Instead, the months ahead are sure to be tumultuous ones. Mexico is a highly and increasingly unequal society and more polarized today than perhaps at any time in the past 30 years. In the past few months, political violence and repression have erupted in the states of Michoacan, Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as the Federal District. After what many perceived to be official sanction of a stolen presidential election in 1988, political violence took the lives of hundreds of opposition party activists.

Calderón will begin his presidency with a crisis of legitimacy.

How President Vicente Fox, Mexican civil society, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the new administration handle the crisis will determine whether the 2006 election ushers in a new round of reforms to strengthen Mexican democracy (such as a runoff and an automatic recount for close elections) or ignites a volatile mixture of want, exclusion and repression, the repercussions of which would likely be felt north of the border.

Adair, a recent graduate of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT-Austin, was a member of two of Global Exchange's international electoral observation teams in Mexico this summer. He lives in Austin.