MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mexicans await election verdict

Mexico's top election tribunal announced that it will release on Monday its ruling on the 375 challenges to the July 2 national election in which the two top vote-getters were conservative Felipe Calderon and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Officials at the tribunal, known as TRIFE, that the judges must report on each of the complaints, of which 244 were filed by Lopez Obrador's coalition and the other 131 were brought by the governing National Action Party, or PAN, which fielded Calderon as its candidate to succeed President Vicente Fox.

The court will set forth the measures to be taken to remedy - or lay to rest - each complaint, and those measures could include the validation or nullification of ballots and/or a directive to repeat the balloting in certain precincts.

At the close of the process, the seven TRIFE magistrates will present a declaration regarding the validity or invalidity of the closely contested election, and - if they rule that the overall balloting was valid - they will announce the president-elect.

The first official vote count by federal election authorities shortly after the balloting found that Calderon had obtained just under 244,000 more votes than Lopez Obrador, who subsequently denounced what he called massive election fraud and demanded a vote-by-vote recount of all 41 million ballots cast.

The main complaints against the balloting process and the vote count were presented by the leftist coalition, which led the electoral tribunal to perform a recount of ballots at more than 11,000 precincts, the results of which will be made public as part of the TRIFE decision on Monday.

The PAN has insisted that the partial recount did not alter the basic result of the original official vote count, but Lopez Obrador and his supporters claimed that the recount revealed irregularities at more than 8,000 precincts where authorities found that there were either more or less ballots cast than were reflected on the officially certified vote tally sheets affixed to each ballot box.

The leftist coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, has demanded that the electoral tribunal annul the results at all the precincts where discrepancies were found, a move that - the PRD said - would eliminate 1.3 million ballots and would alter the election result such that Lopez Obrador would wind up with more than half a million more votes than Calderon.

Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, has been pursuing a campaign of civil resistence for more than four weeks in numerous cities across the country, in particular in the capital where tens of thousands of his supporters have occupied the central square - the Zocalo - and two of the main downtown avenues, a measure that has substantially disrupted traffic and hurt businesses there.

The leftist coalition's spokesman, Gerardo Fernandez, told to the press that Lopez Obrador's supporters will not let their guard down and will maintain their civil resistance campaign, in particular staging a demonstration outside Congress next Friday, when Fox is scheduled to give his sixth and last state of the nation address.

Leftists have threatened to intensify their demonstrations in the Zocalo and the downtown streets during the speech and during the country's Independence Day celebration on Sept. 15-16