By Sam Dillon
The New York Times
June 28, 2000

Mexico City, June 27 -- Authorities have promised that Mexico's presidential election this Sunday will be the cleanest in history. But recent events suggest that at least some hard-liners in the governing party still believe that electoral chicanery can help them triumph. In recent weeks, a member of the governing party in the state of Puebla offered to pay cash to an election official for credentials that would empower him to help supervise the local balloting. In Yucatan, party members visited citizens randomly selected to be poll watchers to discourage them from serving.

And in a Mexico City suburb, members of the governing party, known as the PRI, were discovered posing as officials from the federal agency organizing the vote, leading a bogus training session on polling place procedures.

"There's been a systematic effort in many places by PRI members to create conditions that will allow them to control polling places," said Alfredo Figueroa, a law professor who is a member of the election agency's governing council in Puebla, the state east of Mexico City.

President Ernesto Zedillo, the head of Mexico's electoral agency and a string of other authorities have dismissed all chances that fraud could determine the presidential winner, pointing to safeguards that include transparent ballot boxes and curtained voting booths. Their case was strengthened when opposition parties reported last week that party representatives would observe balloting at all 113,000 polling places.

But opposition candidates, several members of the agency's national governing board and prominent intellectuals are worried that in a very close election the governing party, with its rich tradition of vote fraud, may revert to its abiding tactics.

"The old power is resisting change," Humberto Musacchio, the editor of a Mexican encyclopedia, wrote in a recent newspaper column. "Many officials in our state and local electoral agencies are PRI members who very probably think in old ways and are ready to act in the old style."

Final opinion polls last week showed the leading candidates, Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the PRI, formally known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Vicente Fox Quesada of the center-right National Action Party, finishing the campaign in a dead heat.

"The number of dirty votes won't be immense," Mr. Musacchio added in an interview. "But in an election like this, fraud could determine the outcome."

Carlos Almada, a senior PRI official, said in an interview that his party had shown its democratic commitment in years of elections in which opposition parties had won control of 11 state governments, the Chamber of Deputies and hundreds of towns. He ridiculed the suggestion that the party could be preparing to steal votes.

"We're trying to win legally," he said. "We want this election to be legitimate."

But skepticism persists. In a recent speech, Jorge Castaneda, an author who is a Fox adviser and a commentator on Televisa, the largest television network, outlined one fraud possibility: the party might use bribes or other methods to intervene in an election day Televisa exit poll, he said, thereby preparing public opinion for a Labastida victory that PRI poll workers would obtain through fraud in subsequent hours in rural precincts. Televisa reacted by dismissing Mr. Castaneda as a commentator.

Since its founding in 1929, the governing party has won 13 consecutive presidential votes, overwhelming many weak opponents without recourse to fraud. But in many local elections and in presidential contests in 1929, 1940, 1952 and 1988, the party resorted to fraud, historians have concluded.

To give the system new credibility after the turbulent 1988 balloting, President-elect Carlos Salinas created a new agency, the Federal Electoral Institute. Controlled during its first years by the Interior Ministry, it later came under the control of a nine-member citizens board that has in turn appointed citizen councils to oversee local offices in 32 states and 300 congressional districts.

Mexico has spent billions of dollars to compile a reliable list of eligible voters, to issue 60 million photographic voting credentials, and to carry out other reforms.

Yet frauds still happen. In November, a tribunal accepted opposition arguments that PRI officials had won a mayoral election in the capital of Hidalgo State, just north of Mexico City, by surreptitiously annulling 38 ballots cast in favor of Mr. Fox's party. The court overturned the result.

In the PRI's own Nov. 7 presidential primary, a photographer caught dramatic images of a top party election official, revolver drawn, stealing ballot boxes in Puebla.

Before this year's election, experts considered that an element of the electoral system still vulnerable to manipulation was the army of polling place officials whose one-day duties include supervising the vote and counting the ballots. The institute has dedicated enormous resources to recruiting and training half a million of these volunteers, selected by computer at random.

Yet in half a dozen states, citizens designated for poll duty have reported that PRI members have systematically discouraged them from serving. In five towns in Yucatan State, for instance, PRI members went door to door visiting citizens selected for polling duty to argue that the work was dull and not obligatory, said Patricia McCarthy, one of the institute's councilors in that southeast state.

In the capital of Puebla, similar visits were so numerous that councilors circulated a report warning that PRI members were carrying out a campaign to advise poll workers against reporting for duty.

In three states, PRI members have been discovered posing as officials of the electoral institute to organize training sessions for polling place workers.

On April 6 in a Mexico City suburb, for instance, electoral officials went to a storefront office in response to a citizen's complaint and were greeted by people who introduced themselves as trainers for the institute but who were later discovered to be PRI members, lecturing a group of citizens seated at tables. The institute officials filed a criminal complaint.

Other difficulties arose in the designation by computer of the volunteer officials who are to serve as presidents, secretaries and vote-counters at the polling places.

In some districts of Tabasco, Veracruz and Puebla states, as many as one in every three polling place officials were mistakenly designated. And subsequent investigations showed that the institute's own bureaucrats, who acquired their loyalties when the PRI was in control and fraud was frequent, had been feeding the computers false information that confused the selection process.

One result was that some blind and mentally retarded people were chosen to preside over vote-counting, and in other cases barely literate peasants were assigned to head precincts while university professors were sidelined.

Similar irregularities occurred in Tepeaca, the seat of an election district in Puebla. As in all 300 congressional districts, a council of local citizens oversees the election preparations. Several of the councilors complained that their efforts had been undercut by a staff of federal bureaucrats.

María del Carmen Jean, a dentist who is a councilor in the Tepeaca district, said she and associates discovered 307 errors in the designation of thousands of polling officials. Whether those resulted from incompetence or bad faith is not clear, but the bureaucrat responsible, a former PRI councilman in Tepeaca, ordered subordinates to hide the errors, she and other councilors said. That would have led to election day mayhem, so Ms. Jean and two other councilors worked for days to reappoint and train the correct poll watchers.

The atmosphere grew tense after men asked to buy packets of ballots and election credentials this spring, Ms. Jean said. The man who made the first offer, for credentials, was identified in an official report as a prominent local PRI member. Officials said they believed the men who on two occasions offered cash for ballots were also PRI members.

After officials spurned the bribe offers, Ms. Jean said, there were attempts to scare them when car drivers on five occasions ran election trainers into ditches.

But the councilors, who have been working seven days a week to arrange honest balloting, shrugged off that intimidation.

"Let the people's vote count," said Dulce María Juárez, a councilor who is a professional photographer.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company