Opinion Archive

What to Make of Fixing Elections

April 15, 2009

Election season is upon us. On Sunday, July 5th, Mexicans will decide the makeup of the Chamber of Deputies: 500 people, 300 chosen by direct vote plus 200 chosen by "proportional representation", according to party lists. Local elections will also take place in the DF, Mexico State, Campeche, Nuevo León, Sonora, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro and Colima. There, people will choose their local legislators and their "Municipal Presidents", or mayors. Candidates are not allowed to do any proselytizing until May (the actual date depends on the state and the elected position). In many cases, being caught campaigning in the "quiet period" can mean being disqualified.

Despite the impressive organization of the Mexican electoral system, perhaps the most sophisticated in the world, there is a large gap between how it is supposed to work and how it actually does work. The past couple of weeks have seen revelations of an alleged PRD narcocandidate and a publicized attempt on behalf of the National Lottery (officially, a government-run charity) to fund a PAN candidate for the governorship of Campeche. Two reminders that, despite over-zealous laws and regulations (perhaps even because of them), Mexico's electoral system is flawed. Worse, by accusing one another of shamefaced corruption and then being caught doing the same things (as invariably happens to every political party everywhere), democracy loses credibility, hurting everyone.

Most of the problem lies with the roles political parties and electoral institutions play (or fail to). As was mentioned in last week's article, Mexico has given political parties the run of the house thanks to the fact that no reelection means that politicians are beholden to their party bosses. Elected officials are forced to look to them for a job when their appointment is over in either 3 years (deputies and mayors) or 6 years (senators and governors). Thus, when the PRI and the PRD were beside themselves with anger at having lost the election in 2006 to a plain vanilla PAN candidate who successfully painted them as crooks and Anarchists (PRI and PRD, respectively), they simply outlawed negative ads. They then put all sorts of restrictions on a slew of other things... but they left weak internal party structures, and electoral enforcement on behalf of voting institutions, alone.

Your correspondent was a candidate in 2003. Having lived his own personal "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" moment, he has spared the electorate any further personal petitions for their precious votes. But, while it is OK for some people to avoid politics due to personal disillusionment, when too many public-spirited people who might prove to be worthwhile avoid having their names on ballots the system is hijacked by politicians who have nothing to lose. Given Mexico's rampant impunity, it doesn't cost anything for a disgraced politician (who is usually otherwise unemployable) to live up to his or her reviled corrupt image. Worse, despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars, parties leave their candidates, who are novices by law, to fend for themselves. Party money should be used to vet, train and monitor candidates, as well as to fund 100% of their campaigns and establish quality control mechanisms for those in power. Imagine if electing a candidate from Party X guaranteed a minimum standard of government? Today, you can't.

All politicians are vulnerable to slander by a media that is often as corrupt as the people they denounce. Much of the problem lies in the way that candidates promote themselves during elections. If the electoral institutes and tribunals (there are a total of 66 between the states and the federation) are going to be asked to police elections, they should be given the task of defining the spaces where candidate advertising campaigns can take place. That is, there should be a predetermined set of places where candidates can broadcast their name, image and platform. Letters and brochures mailed to the electorate, advertisements and interviews in the media; all should be predetermined. Even lampposts on major thoroughfares could have steel frames where campaign propaganda could be displayed in an orderly fashion. The allotment of these spaces would be difficult to negotiate, but candidates could then compete openly on the quality of their proposals and how they market them.

Today, "enforcing" the rules means haphazardly chasing candidates who are constantly told what not to do. No one handles the very real public need for candidates to get their message across. Worse, by leaving it up to novice candidates the system has opened up huge grey areas that leave both the public, and the candidates themselves, vulnerable. With their power and multi-billion dollar budgets, the parties, the Institutes, and the Tribunals can fix Mexico's elections, stopping them from being "fixed" by someone else.

For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page

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