Today the real count begins in Mexico

The Sunday preliminary results for the Mexican elections were of the ‘quick count’ system. That’s where precincts send their counts directly to the central electoral officials (IFE) electronically. Almost 99% of those reports are now in. Those are the results in which Calderon has a lead of 0.6%.


Go to original.

Today, the official count begins at the district level. All the paperwork and sealed ballot boxes from the precincts will be reviewed at the district. If there are any inconsistencies or problems in the paperwork, the sealed ballot box will be opened, and the votes will be re-counted by hand before certifying the results. (I read that at least o One district had opened their box because the paperwork was missing to begin counting by hand , but now I can’t find the link.) If the paperwork is in order, the district tallies all the votes from the precinct paperwork; certifies it; and sends it upward through IFE.

The NYTimes has a couple of articles about the elections.

The leftist paper, La Jornada, is reporting that precinct paperwork for a poor neighborhood in Mexico State (but part of the Mexico City metropolitan area) has been found at the dump.

Ok. Last post for the night just because I’m annoyed

Univision has the most clueless anchors. They keep reporting the aggregate vote percentages, but provide no analysis beyond “the gap keeps getting smaller, and AMLO is gaining.”

A quick look at the disaggregated rapid count votes shows that different percentages of precincts have reported from different regions which have different tendencies.

How hard would it be to do a sub-national analysis using the available data?

I sure hope Mexicans in Mexico have access to better anchors than those that are stranded here with Univision.

Buenas noches. Espero que cuando me despierto manana, haya un presidente nuevo sin violencia o derrota del mercado financiero (pq ya ha bajado el peso….).

Ok. Now it’s just getting repetitive

I think I’m going to bed.

El Universal has the easiest to access results of the various sites allowed by IFE to published the rapid count results. The margin keeps getting smaller.

Notably, Madrazo did not make an announcement, though his spokesperson did. He urged patience and respect for the rules.

It’s like a train wreck…you don’t want to look but you can’t help yourself.

Lopez Obrador speeking to followers at the Zocalo

But, webcams are not working.

Essentially, he’s saying that they need to be vigilant of the vote count to make sure that the “truth” of their victory is respected.

As one of the Univision analysts has pointed out, though both Calderon and AMLO are claiming victory, they are not doing so in a way that disrespects the other candidate. Each are claiming that the votes will support their victory more like a continuation of their campaigns than a definitive claim of victory.

Only time will tell.

At 12:27: Calderon will respect IFE, but poll results say that we have won (though only 35% of precincts have reported)

Calderon:

We will respect the decision of the IFE and the procedures in place.

Conteo Rapidos: We’ve won according to their count.

But also according to the exit polls:
Arco: 37% PAN, 35% PRD

Economistas Asociados: 36.6, 33.4%

Another (BNC?): 37%, 35%

Marketing Politico: 38%, 34%

Conteo Rapidio
Economistas Asociados: 38.8%, 34.9%

Arco: missed it

Sistema del IFE: 38.35%, 35.7% with 35% of districts reporting.

“We do not doubt that we have won.”

He then went on to congratulate PAN governors-elect in three states.

AMLO: “Ganamos la Republica”

Less than five minutes after head of the Electoral Institute and the President announced that results would not be available until the full vote on Wednesday and urged Mexicans to be patient, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is on TV (at 11:20 local time) telling the country that he has won. He believes his camp has won by at least 500,000 votes.

He’s headed for the Zocalo to tell the people that this result will not be reversed.

{My stomach still hurts.}

IFE announces no result

Luis Ugalde is right now announcing that the rapid count is too close to call.

He’s saying that we’ll have to wait for the official count, due Wednesday. And, only the IFE can certify the vote, and he urges everyone to wait for the full vote.

The country has “una enorme responsibildad” and the parties should wait for and respect the full vote, according to Ugalde.

{And he looks like he’s sweating a LOT.}

And, all manifestaciones should wait….that is, no one should take to the streets.

{Shit….uh oh.}

Now, Fox is making an announcement. I’d sure hate to be him. {Geez, he sure has aged in just six years….} He’s saying Mexico has already made its decision at the polls, and the country must wait for the “impartial, transparent electoral institutions” to do their job.

{My stomach hurts….}

Today’s progress

Whew! I finished that conference paper (a full 3 weeks before the conference) and set a new personal record (3 days). I don’t think it’s horrible either. Since its directly related to a sliver of my book manuscript, it was not entirely a detour from the book, just a brief pit stop.

From the paper’s introduction:

This paper answers two rather modest questions relevant for these latter diffusion explanations: How do IOs influence domestic social policy? And, is there anything new about the ways IOs participate in the diffusion of policy? These are important questions, since a handful of recent studies suggest that IOs have not had a significant impact on social policy outcomes since the 1980s (Hunter and Brown 2000; Brooks 2005). These studies fail to find a statistical relationship between international aid or World Bank lending and social spending or pension privatization. In this paper, I contend that IOs do influence social policy, though not in ways likely to be measured by cross national comparisons of program lending and policy outcomes. International financial institutions may have used the blunt instrument of loan conditionality and one-size-fits-all structural adjustment recommendations during the debt crisis of the 1980s, but few would characterize the social policy approach of IOs during the 1990s as such. Seldom is IO influence on social policy a matter of a gross display of influence through loan conditionality or the imposition of simple policy models. Instead, the influence of IOs on social policy has been important but more nuanced than many characterizations would admit. Further, recent studies fail to address the second question posed above; they fail to ask what is new, if anything, about the ways IOs influence policy. I show that recent participation of IOs in policy formation shares both commonalities and differences with participation of IOs in the first half of the twentieth century. To illustrate the ways IOs influence social policy, both recently and historically, I compare social insurance policy formation in Mexico during the 1940s and 1990s. In neither case did IO participation decisively cause the policy outcomes, but in both cases IOs provided both important technical advice and established important international norms regarding policy that influenced the types of policies that were ultimately adopted.

And from the conclusion:

This paper demonstrates the ways in which IOs have sought to influence domestic social insurance policy in Mexico, though with mixed results, in two important periods of policy reform. Several general observations should be made regarding the Mexican experience. Efforts of IOs to influence domestic social policy are not a new feature of recent globalization; IOs have always sought to influence policy in Mexico. This is consistent with findings of comparative and historical studies (Deacon 1999; Orenstein 2003). Though the regularity of IO participation and the means of influence (technical assistance or loans) observed in Mexico are likely to be similar to experiences of other developing nations, this IO influence stands in marked contrast to the experience of most advanced industrialized democracies, where it is safer to assume that all welfare politics are domestic. This suggests that studies of welfare in the developing world should be careful to consider the influence of IOs when explaining policy outcomes, even if IO participation is not decisive in determining policy. If Mexico provides any finding worth generalizing, it is probably that the politics of social insurance are still predominantly domestic, despite efforts by IOs to influence policy outcomes. IOs may provide policy inputs, but whether those inputs are incorporated into policy will ultimately be constrained by the domestic political context.

Now, to decide what to do with the rest of the day (until election results start coming in) as a reward. This, perhaps? [No, Brian voted for this.]

Update: The movie was good, but be sure to see it somewhere with digital sound. The sound drug really bad in the new theatre where we saw it, which made the score sound off key during intense parts of the movie.

Today’s the vote

And come hell or high water, the IFE will announce the results of the preliminary count at 11pm.

The World Cup is still a close second for top news story, however.

Progress

Number of typewritten pages: 10.5

Notes for reamining 3 pages of paper: check

Number of futbol games watched: 2

Number of pages in the latest Archie/Nero adventure read: 80+

Number of espressos: I’m not tellin.

It was a long day.

Progress

Yesterday: 1 typed page (because I had to spend time making up for the fact that I never took the IR security core in graduate school)

Today: 7 typed pages. Goal: another 10 to produce a 20-25 page conference paper

Update today: Two more typed pages and notes for rest of paper.