Bug or trap? The anomalies hidden in the bowels of PREP

MEXICO CITY (apro).- In the preliminary database of the National Electoral Institute (INE) as a result of the election day on June 2, boxes appear whose results suggest errors in the capture of the records, or irregular acts perpetrated on election day: Morena and its allies from the PVEM and the PT obtained more than 90% of votes in 2,468 polling stations, while in 893 polling stations, the same coalition obtained less than 10% of the ballots in its favor.

According to a review carried out by Proceso of the INE’s preliminary data on the presidential elections, most of the polling stations where Morena and its allies monopolized more than 90% of the ballots were located in the southeastern states, with 674 polling stations in Chiapas, 639 in Oaxaca, 332 in Guerrero and 255 in Tabasco.

These polling stations represented 1.4% of the total polling stations installed in the country, and contributed 710,102 votes to the ruling bloc, according to preliminary figures.

On the contrary, Morena and his coalition obtained abnormally low votes in 187 polls in Nuevo León, 138 in Jalisco, 124 in Mexico City and 110 in the State of Mexico, although on many occasions these were errors in the capture of the votes. data in the INE system.

In the 893 polling stations where the ruling bloc received less than 10% of the ballots – and where, therefore, the other parties concentrated more than 90% of the votes –, 342,911 ballots were counted in favor of the opposition.

This data comes from the Preliminary Election Results Program (PREP), which is not the official election results.

These abnormal data can arise from errors in the capture of the minutes by officials, but also from practices of mass hauling of voters, vote buying, or intimidation on election day.

For this work, Proceso only analyzed the boxes with more than 20 registered votes, so as not to include the adjacent boxes with 2 or 3 votes, all in favor of the same party.

This Wednesday, the INE launched the district counting phase, in which it will proceed to recount votes in 66% of the polls to validate the results of the presidential elections, and in 70% of the polls for federal legislation.

The INE insisted that these reviews will provide some corrections in the percentages, but that these will be marginal and will not reverse the victory of Morena and its elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.

The electoral referee has categorically rejected the accusations that fraud took place on June 2, as propagated by some opposition voices in the media and social networks.

Unique signatures

A third of the 2,412 polling stations where Morena, the PVEM and the PT had more than 90% of the votes were installed in Chiapas, mainly in the turbulent border region of the entity: 222 polling stations were in the municipality of Ocosingo, 147 in Palenque, 129 in Las Margaritas and 66 in Comitán de Domínguez. In the atypical Chiapas polling stations, the Morena bloc captured 245,295 votes, of which 79,704 came from Ocosingo.

Strange cases abound in the entity with the highest poverty rates in the country: in Comitán, in section 520, the PVEM obtained 99.43% of the 1,249 ballots issued, and the only party representative who signed the minutes on election day He was a green militant. In the same municipality, but in section 512, Morena received 1,441 of the 1,472 votes, and the PT had another 21, while 31 ballots were considered invalid. That day, only the representatives of Morena and the PT signed the minutes.

This scheme was repeated in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Tabasco, and on a smaller scale in Quintana Roo, Veracruz, Hidalgo and Baja California.

At the municipal level, the INE had records of polling stations with abnormally high votes in favor of Morena and its allies in 115 polling stations in Ixtepec, 85 polling stations in Acapulco, 71 in Macuspana – the municipality where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was born – 66 in Cancún, 62 from Zihuatanejo, 44 ​​in Villahermosa and 39 in Ciudad Juárez, among others.

Of the 2,468 polling stations that reported more than 90% of votes for the official bloc, only 79 were installed in states governed by the opposition: apart from the 41 in Chihuahua and 26 in Durango, there were less than 4 in Coahuila, Guanajuato, Nuevo León and Querétaro, and just one in Jalisco and Aguascalientes.

filling opposition

Not all the boxes with abnormal data recorded in the PREP favored the party founded by López Obrador: in 893, the coalition that swept the polls at the national level did not have even one in ten ballots in its favor, mainly in states controlled by the opposition.

In the four boxes in section 3067 of Zapopan, in Jalisco, 90% of the ballots were marked in favor of the PAN and the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition, as were another 26 boxes in that suburban municipality of Guadalajara and base operation of a branch of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

In section 431 of Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán – an entity directed by Morena –, the PAN obtained 100% of the 195 votes cast; in Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas, section 1725 did not have a single vote for Morena and his allies; in Huixquilucan, State of Mexico, the five polling stations in section 6757 had 93.4% of ballots in favor of the opposition parties; In Nuevo León, the municipality of Santa Catarina had 92 voting booths in which Morena and his allies received around 5% of the votes.

The PRD captured 95.4% of the votes in the 2014 poll of Chilapa de Álvarez, in Guerrero, one of the municipalities where the Los Ardillos criminal group operates, whose leader is the brother of Bernardo Ortega Jiménez, the president of the PRD in the entity. . According to PREP data, the PRD had abnormally high numbers in 17 polling stations in Chilapa.

The anomalies that were detrimental to Morena and its allies in the PREP occurred mainly in polling stations located in municipalities or states controlled by the opposition, such as León, in Guanajuato (where there were 57 polling stations with less than 10% of votes for Morena), Monterrey and Santa Catarina, in Nuevo León (85 and 92 boxes, respectively), the Miguel Hidalgo mayor’s office, in Mexico City, with 43 boxes; Huixquilucan and Naucalpan, in the State of Mexico, or the capital of Aguascalientes, with 17 boxes.

According to the Proceso review, many anomalies in the data from polling stations with few votes in favor of Morena may be the product of human errors, which subtracted thousands of votes from the cherry party.

In section 6674 of Metepec, in the State of Mexico, the person in charge did not fill out the scrutiny and counting record correctly, so in the PREP system all the votes appeared as “null”, when in reality Morena had 305 votes. the 529 ballots issued.

In 1522, of the Gustavo A. Madero Mayor’s Office, the results of several parties, including Morena, were registered as illegible, so 236 votes out of 416 were not counted.