La Jornada: Despite the fact that 12 years ago a political transition was
initiated in Mexico, a group of political scientists warn:
"We have failed to build society's confidence in democracy. The old political system that doesn't respect the will of citizens to elect their rulers continues to live",
With the election results of 2006 and 2012, they said, "it has become very clear that it is not enough to change the rules of the electoral game; the mechanisms of the past for controlling access to power continue functioning."
Assessing the July 1 elections, researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) and the Technological Institute of Superior Studies of Monterrey (ITESM), stressed that not only were the results impacted by the use of rigged polls, vote buying and coercion;
"it is clear that we were not able to secure the full involvement of a citizenry that does not trust its institutions."
Edgar Esquivel, professor and researcher at UAM Cuajimalpa and expert in the study of opinion polls and surveys, said the use of these tools as a tool of electoral propaganda
"does not compare to what happened in 2006, because in that year far fewer were reported than the 3,144 surveys reported to the electoral bodies in 2012. This is a situation that powerfully catches one's attention, because the average cost to survey a person can reach 300 pesos [about $23US], so they are very expensive studies. It should then be asked who funded so many surveys."
He warned that post-election conflicts that Mexico has faced in the presidential elections
"cannot be solved only with legislative reforms: It seems that one always confronts some legal loophole when dealing with the breaking of the rules. More worrisome is that there isn't full involvement of our citizenry, and that will not be fixed by decree."
In a separate interview, José Luis de la Cruz, a researcher at the ITESM, said a centerpiece of any election is
"to guarantee a fair process to elect our leaders, because, once you lose this condition, it is very difficult to give certainty to transparency, and thus validate that those who govern have the legitimacy of the vote."
As specialists, he said
"it is clear to us that the Mexican electoral process, despite being carried out for more than a decade in a transition, is expensive and inefficient. In a period of six years, we have lived through two highly contested elections, which has not resulted in the consolidation of our democracy."
Martha Singer, Professor on the Political Science Faculty of the UNAM, said that given the challenges to the election results of July 1, which has led to a part of society that did not vote for the PRI to demand absolute certainty and transparency,
"leads us to believe that we are still facing elections that are not satisfactory, because we have not been able to prevent old practices (politics) from generating so many doubts about who won the election and how."
Spanish original