Mexico Election: The Fix Appears to be IN!

Early last week I wrote about [http://thepete.com/tight-election-conservative-wins-no-not-us/|the Mexican general election] and how it reminded me so dramatically of the last two American presidential elections.

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only person reminded of those elections. There's a journalist whose work is so contravertial that he rarely gets hired in the US and instead works as a reporter for the BBC. His name is Greg Palast and I've blogged about him before. He wrote a book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It's basically a compilation of his coverage of the theft of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Yep, he's got pretty solid evidence that those elections were rigged (in case you didn't already know).

Logically, he made his way down to Mexico and did a report for the BBC on what's going on down there. Surprise, surprise, he found all sorts of corruption, but most interestingly, he found that Choicepoint, a company that helped the Florida state government rid it's electoral rolls of over 90,000 legal voters (most of them black), had gathered up a huge list of Mexican voters information and given it to the USG.

Yep, Palast says that the USG hired CP to gather up as much information on voters in Mexico as they could. The catch? That's illegal in Mexico. Apparently the voter information is confidential--not just your political party is kept in voting records, it's stuff like, your name, your job, your age, your...well, you get the point.

Since CP was so heavily involved in the 2000 elections, isn't it ironic that they've shown up in Mexico in 2006?

You can read [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/146201|a transcript of Palast's coverage from July 12, 2006] which was aired on Democracy Now. Here's an excerpt to get you started:

So I booked the first flight out to Mexico City to answer the question: Did Felipe Calderon of the conservative PAN, the party in power, win the presidential election fairly or was this just another Florida con salsa?” The official numbers just didn't add up. So my first stop was to meet one of Mexico's top numbers experts, statistician Victor Romero of Mexico's National University. Dr. Romero had charted the official government elections returns from each of Mexico's 113,000 voting stations.

VICTOR ROMERO: The way I did this was, a friend of mine, that he had the results second by second.

GREG PALAST: Well, randomly, this can't happen.

VICTOR ROMERO: Can’t happen.

There's plenty more where that came from and I'm sure Palast will uncover more about this, too.