Aug
31

Fuzzy math in Mexico

From Charles Utwater:

It seems that the mechanism by which the Mexican Elections Court maintained the appearance of a Calderon victory may be that, in effect, they only annulled precincts in which the vote was close, while leaving intact obviously corrupted precincts where the vote was not close.

The following is second hand, but the links are there by which one could directly confirm.

Also, this explanation is consistent with other data that have made their way into the press. In particular, almost equal numbers of votes were subtracted from Calderon and Lopez Obrador by the court. Since most of the challenged districts were Calderon strongholds, the annulled precincts must have been those in which the vote was closest.

Feel free to send it on or post it under the understanding that it hasn’t been directly confirmed.

– Charles

The Mexican Mathdance

…
Abizarre explanation of how the electoral court reached its verdict, from a program called Con Elisa in Mexico City: If a recount would not change the victor in a particular precinct, the precinct was not annulled. So, if Calderon had 250 votes in a precinct and Obrador had 100 votes and it was discovered that 100 votes were fraudulent, the precinct result would stand. The law would seem to require that the precinct be annulled.

Another source, Garras de Paco Garrido seems to have confirmed that this bizarre logic was used. This purports to be an actual copy of the judicial ruling for the complaint for district 03 of Querétaro SUP-JIN-21/2006, and is said to be on the electoral court’s website (www.trife.gob.mx), but I can’t get the file to download. Garras says (paraphrase):

in district 03, they recounted 59 precincts and only in 9 did they rectify the results. Despite the inconsistencies, the judges only annulled two precincts. Under the standards of the TEPFJ, 38 precincts had results that didn’t square, butthe court said


In these precincts, there was some difference between the figures of the basic results, but the difference was smaller than that obtained between the candidates in first and second place in that precinct.

Garras continues They annulled precincts 416-1 and 537. In 416-1, the electoral institute gave them 734 ballots, 356 were surplus, 388 citizens voted, placing 361 ballots in the ballot box, from which were obtained 372 votes. Because the PRD won the precinct 137 to 119, the difference of 18 votes is less than the total vote discrepancy (which Garras, using math beyond my means, says is 24). That means the PRD would have won, so the precinct must be annulled.

If true, and I suppose it probably is, the Court deserves to be laughed out of office.

# posted by Charles @ 11:05 AM

http://phoenixwoman.blogspot.com/2006/08/mexican-mathdance.html


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