Galbraith on Mexican election

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doing maths in Mexico
James K Galbraith

July 17, 2006 11:30 AM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/james_k_galbraith/2006/07/the_mexican_standoff.html

   The election was stolen. It's not in doubt. Colin Powell admits
it. The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican
Institute both admit it. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana - a
Republican - was emphatic: there had been "a concerted and forceful
program of election-day fraud and abuse"; he "had heard" of employers
telling their workers how to vote; yet he had also seen the fire of
the resisting young, "not prepared to be intimidated".

   In Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski has demanded that the results
be set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye - no less - of the
United Nations. In The New York Times, Steven Lee Myers decried "the
use of government resources on behalf of loyal candidates and the
state's control over the media" - factors, he said, were akin to
practices in "Putin's Russia".

I wrote those words two years ago, for Salon. They referred, of
course, to the election in the Ukraine, where the presidential
candidate favoured by the powerful neighbouring state (Russia) had
claimed a tainted victory in a tight race. The thunder from America,
citadel of democracy, was overwhelming. Nothing mattered more than to
see the vote annulled, a new election held. The subsequent
installation of Viktor Yuschenko as President of Ukraine was widely
celebrated as a great triumph for democracy.

But that, of course, was in another country. Two weeks have now passed
since the presidential vote in Mexico, pitting Andrés Manuel López
Obrador of the party for a Democratic Revolution (PRD) against Felipe
Calderón of the ruling National Action party (PAN). The candidate who
trailed, López Obrador, has explicitly charged that the count was
cooked. He has challenged the result in court. No final resolution is
due before September.

Yet the stalwarts of democracy outside Mexico are silent. Bush has
congratulated Calderón, not waiting for the court to rule. Reuters and
Bloomberg echo the confidence of the elites that Calderón will win in
court - never mind whether he won at the polls. When The New York
Times is heard from, the headlines tell us of the "leftist claims"
about the occurrence of fraud, while Calderón is described as
"presidential." The Times never doubted that fraud did occur in
Ukraine. In Mexico on the other hand, it seemingly renounces any duty
to examine the facts on the ground.

Here's one difference between the two situations. In Ukraine, it was
extremely hard to learn exactly what the evidence of fraudulence
actually was. In Mexico, it is extremely easy. That is because the
Mexican electoral authority, known as IFE, posted the ongoing count on
its website in real time, an initiative called PREP. Independent
scholars kept a record of PREP as the night progressed. A statistical
analysis of that record does not, of course, constitute proof. But it
brings to mind Henry David Thoreau's remark that circumstantial
evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

To begin with, a simple matter. According to an article by Roberto
González Amador in La Jornada, the vote totals don't match the
percentages reported. Given the just over 15m votes Calderón was said
to have earned, the percentage reported for him, 35.89%, could only be
obtained by including invalid ballots in the total reported. If, on
the other hand, one takes the overall vote total and the percentage
reported for Calderón as correct, then his total vote must have been
substantially less than was reported.

The same is true for AMLO and the other candidates, and there is a
total shortfall of over a million votes between what can be justified
by the official percentages of the valid votes, and the sum of votes
reported. The discrepancy proves nothing, but even if it is only a
simple error, it certainly seems to cast doubt over the competence of
the count.

Let's turn to the harder stuff. An analysis by the physicist Luis
Mochán of UNAM based on the realtime evolution of the vote count and
the distribution of vote totals by polling place can be found here,
and in greater detail in Spanish, here. It's not easy reading, but is
immensely worthwhile. It's possible that Mochán's work inaugurates a
new era in realtime checking for vote fraud, made possible by the
simplicity of Mexico's first-past-the-post direct vote and the rich
electoral data sets that can be made instantly available. Call it the
age of transparency, in collision with an oligarchy of thugs.

Mochán's work calls attention to at least four important anomalies in the count.

1. Calderón's percentage lead in the count started at around seven
percentage points, and diminished steadily in percentage terms through
the first part of the count. This corresponded to a remarkably
constant absolute differential between Calderón and AMLO as the count
progressed. Is this normal? The count depended on the arrival of the
boxes; if this were absolutely random then the proportions should have
held roughly constant while absolute differentials widened, as
actually happened to the differential between Calderón and the third
major candidate, Madrazo of the PRI, for most of the evening. Why did
the Calderón-AMLO differential follow a different rule?

2. The PREP results went on view only after the first 10,000 boxes had
been processed. If those first 10,000 boxes resembled what came later,
then extrapolating backward should produce a line intersecting the
origin - each candidate should have started with zero votes. For
Calderón this is the case, but for AMLO it is not: the AMLO intercept
is actually at minus 126,000 votes. Thus, the first 10,000 boxes were
markedly different from those that followed. How?

3. There are gross anomalies in the number of votes counted per
five-minute interval as the count finishes. Over the course of the
evening, the pattern of vote counts set a normal range for this
variable. As the last boxes came in, however, it was radically
violated, with many more votes piled in, per interval, than was normal
before. Moreover, toward the very end, PREP reset the box count, which
regressed from 127,936 at 13.17 on July 3 to 127,713 at 13.50, meaning
that records for 223 boxes disappeared. 33 minutes had by then passed
with no updates. When they resumed, there were updates with absurd
results: more than 6000 votes per box at 13:57, and then updates with
large negative votes per box at 13:57 and 14:03.

4. From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of
votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is.
But for Calderón and AMLO it isn't. In Calderón's case, the
distribution appears to be shifted out, with the shift localized among
the last 40,000 boxes counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution
tails off abruptly from its peak. It is in the difference between the
slightly fat distribution for Calderón and the shaved distribution for
AMLO that the difference in the final outcome is to be found. A graph
of the differences in Calderón and AMLO's votes per box, which ought
to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a certain range, Calderón's
margins appear abnormally large.

Professor Mochán does not claim to explain these anomalies. More time
and closer investigation remain necessary. But he does conclude that
it "is reasonable to suspect that there could have been a manipulation
of the results reported by the PREP." It is true that the PREP is not
an official count - that was done at the district offices, with
equally serious anomalies alleged. But PREP reported the box-by-box
results as they flowed in-and as such it constitutes a vital
instrument for the detection of patterns of manipulation and fraud.

Let me go further than Mochán. The evidence he assembles is consistent
with the following possibilities:

1. That Felipe Calderón started the night with an advantage in total
votes, a gift from the authorities.

2. That as the count progressed this advantage was maintained by
misreporting of the actual results. This enabled Calderón to claim
that he had led through the entire process - an argument greatly
repeated but spurious in any case because it is only the final count
that matters.

3. That toward the end of the count, further adjustments were made to
support the appearance of a victory by Calderón.

Add these elements together, and there is no reason to accept the
almost universal view that the election was close. AMLO might have won
by a mile.

If you want sound and colour, there's plenty of that too: actual tally
sheets showing that votes counted for AMLO were reduced, taped
conspiratorial telephone conversations, videotapes that may or may not
show guilty behaviour; the endorsement of Calderón by Fox; the
inclusion of PAN themes in corporate advertising. As a Mexican
correspondent writes, "the fraud is a p-r-o-c-e-s-s." In late news, La
Jornada on July 16 charges that 40% of the vote packets have been
illegally reopened by the IFE since the election. This amounts to a
pre-emptive strike against the credibility of any recount. The
charges, if true, are tantamount to proof of fraud, evidence prima
facie that AMLO won the election.

Is it time to move on? The numbers suggest otherwise. By demonstrating
the possibility of detecting fraud before the results of an election
are officially decided, they also inaugurate a new phase in the
struggle for the recognition of a democratic vote. The Mexican people,
who marched through their capital today, appear determined to carry
that struggle forward until justice is won. Unlike the so-called
Democratic Party in the United States six years back, Andres Manuel
López Obrador appears, for now, determined not to compromise with
fraud.

And for those of us outside Mexico, we must decide where we stand:
with democracy ... or quietly on the sidelines?


--
Jim Devine / "You need a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.