As Mexico launched the official recount of presidential vote tallies
Wednesday, conservative Felipe Calderon insisted his slim lead from a
preliminary count would hold, and said he would be willing to include his
leftist rival in his Cabinet as a show of unity.
Campaign coordinator
for Mexican presidential candidate Felipe Calderon, of the National Action
Party (PAN), right, speaks aside a graph showing where he expects his
party to fair strongest during a news conference in Mexico City, Mexico,
Wednesday, July 5, 2006. Early numbers showed Calderon behind Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), from
Mexico's vote recount, but PAN officials say their strongest areas of the
country have yet to reflected in the count.
[AP] |
"Mexico needs us all," Calderon said in an exclusive interview with The
Associated Press.
In spite of Calderon's confidence, the recount as of late Wednesday showed
the former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with a slight lead. It
was considered far from certain that the trend would hold.
Insisting he was victorious, Lopez Obrador threatened to ignore the final
tally because of "serious evidence of fraud."
Calderon told the AP he would be willing to include his leftist rival in his
Cabinet — an effort to build a coalition government and avoid weeks of political
impasse. But he said he did not believe Lopez Obrador would accept, adding that
the two men had not spoken to each other since Sunday's election.
Election workers at 300 district headquarters across the country were adding
up the tallies compiled election day by poll volunteers. Under law, they must
work around the clock. With 80 percent of the tally sheets recounted, Lopez
Obrador had 37 percent, compared with 35 percent for Calderon. There was no way
to know whether that trend would hold.
The preliminary count completed earlier in the week had Calderon winning by 1
percentage point. Leonel Cota, president of Lopez Obrador's party, accused
election officials of deliberately mishandling that count to confirm a win for
Calderon, the ruling-party candidate. He said Lopez Obrador won Sunday's vote.
"We are not going to recognize an election that showed serious evidence of
fraud, that was dirty from the start, manipulated from the start," he said.
When polls closed, citizens staffing the 130,488 polling places opened the
ballot boxes and counted the votes, then sealed them into packages with their
tallies attached and reported unofficial totals to the Federal Electoral
Institute, or IFE. The institute then posted preliminary results on its Web site
from about 41 million ballots cast.
The sealed packages were delivered to district headquarters, where elections
workers used the tallies Wednesday to add up the formal, legal vote totals.
Workers were not reviewing individual ballots except when the packages
appeared tampered with or their tallies were missing, illegible or inconsistent,
including at least 2.6 million ballots likely to shrink Calderon's lead to 0.64
percent if included, election officials said Tuesday.
At one electoral office in Mexico City, officials opened a ballot box because
the vote tally was missing. The votes were then re-counted out loud while 10
party representatives stood by with tape recorders and video cameras.
