BoingBoing reader Mario nos dice:
This article by Greg Palast explains in English more or less what is going on right now in Mexico. We had presidential elections last Sunday, and it is apparent that the right wing party (PAN) is using statistical algorithms in the software that is being used to count the votes to prevent the left wing party (PRD) to win the election.
A team of bloggers with the help of some math experts and other people are analyzing the data that is being broadcast by the official institute that is counting the votes and they are discovering anomalies that may point to an electoral fraud.
The mass media as always is partial to the right wing party and won’t say a thing about it, but through blogs like this and the help of fellow math geeks it won’t be so easy for them to steal the election.
Of course, others in the Spanish-speaking blogosphere do not agree with those sentiments. They point to election results at ife.org.mx as transparent and reliable. For many readers in the US, these online debates — as well as the offline protests and legal battles to follow — feel awfully familiar.
Reader comment: Remo Loiza in Mexico City says,
That “static algorithm” they talk about is a simple algorithm for normalization of graphs. Yes, it was used by the software used to make the PRE final results (PREP in spanish). Those results are just used to see how tendencies are and where they going. Unless this result is way obvious, wich wasn’t this time (less than 1%), the final result is done by manually checking each vote package. This was done and the final vote count did not used that software, it was manually counted.
The IFE (Institution in charge of making elections happen and campaigns) made public announcements about this and most mexicans know about it. Just thought you may want to get that right, the software was not used in the final count so there wasn’t any “algoritmical” modification to it.
Sebastian says,
At senderodelpeje they are only taking the public information being broadcast by IFE, both in the preliminary count (PREP) and in the official count, which was also inputted into a computer system through a network, and analyzing the statistical data, and they have found strange and atypical behaviour in the graphs that suggest the existence of a fraud. It doesn’t matter if the fraud was done at the stage of counting the votes, inputing the votes or inside the software. It is still a serious matter.
What is most interesting here is that for the first time, the people, instead of just sitting there and accepting everything the media says, are taking the information that is being broadcast, they are questioning that information, they are running tests on it and they have found that it doesn’t quite add up. That is a big step from the way things have been in this country in past elections.
Mario says,
There are also allegations that Calderón’s (the PAN presidential candidate) brother-in-law had been involved in the creation of vote-tallying software used by the IFE. Link
eduardo of ochocuartos says,
IFE, the institute behind the mexican elections, is composed of citizens, not party members or candidates.
Almost one million mexicans were randomly selected to act as officials in the electoral process. These randomly selected individuals were assigned to more than 180+ thousand voting venues. Each venue had an official representative of almost every party. Every venue had a representative of each of the two parties that had the most votes.
All the votes of every voting venue were counted publicly and each representative of every party signed a manifest that specified the vote count for every venue. Everyone (the officials and party representatives) got a copy of the manifest.
After the election, a quick vote count (called “PREP”) with only a fraction of manifest was made. Since the difference between the top two contenders was slim (less than 1%), a sum of all the manifests was needed.
This whole process was pre-approved by all parties. Because of historic problems with the electoral process, the voting and counting process has all kinds of locks and checks and representatives of every party are always present. Nothing is done behind closed doors.
Calderon was the candidate with most votes in the PREP and the vote count that was done *after* the PREP.
The losing party insists on counting every single one of the millons of votes. That is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of mexicans that made the election possible. An election that followed a process previously approved by every party and closely watched by everyone and televised live non-stop.
The PREP used a software for calculating a running total. But the manual count that followed was done, like that, manually. With Excel or with pen and paper.
This might clear things up a little. Thanks!!