| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Jor-el©" |
| Date: |
18 Jul 2006 06:33:17 PM |
| Object: |
Doing Maths In Mexico |
Doing Maths In Mexico---
While Mexicans take to the streets over the presidential vote,
democracy's fairweather friends are standing silent.
by James K. Galbraith
The election was stolen. It's not in doubt. Colin Powell admits it.
The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute
both admit it. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana - a Republican - was
emphatic: there had been "a concerted and forceful program of election-day
fraud and abuse;" he "had heard" of employers telling their workers how to
vote; yet he had also seen the fire of the resisting young, "not prepared to
be intimidated."
In Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski has demanded that the results be
set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye - no less - of the United
Nations. In the New York Times, Steven Lee Myers decried "the use of
government resources on behalf of loyal candidates and the state's control
over the media" - factors, he said, were akin to practices in "Putin's
Russia."
I wrote those words two years ago, for Salon. They referred, of
course, to the election in the Ukraine, where the presidential candidate
favored by the powerful neighboring state (Russia) had claimed a tainted
victory in a tight race. The thunder from America, citadel of democracy, was
overwhelming. Nothing mattered more than to see the vote annulled, a new
election held. The subsequent installation of Viktor Yuschenko as President
of Ukraine was widely celebrated as a great triumph for democracy.
But that, of course, was in another country. Two weeks have now passed
since the presidential vote in Mexico, pitting Andrés Manuel López Obrador
of the party for a Democratic Revolution (PRD) against Felipe Calderón of
the ruling National Action party (PAN). The candidate who trailed, López
Obrador, has explicitly charged that the count was cooked. He has challenged
the result in court. No final resolution is due before September.
Yet the stalwarts of democracy outside Mexico are silent. Bush has
congratulated Calderón, not waiting for the court to rule. Reuters and
Bloomberg echo the confidence of the elites that Calderón will win in
court - never mind whether he won at the polls. When the New York Times is
heard from, the headlines tell us of the "leftist claims" about the
occurrence of fraud, while Calderón is described as "presidential." The
Times never doubted that fraud did occur in Ukraine. In Mexico on the other
hand, it seemingly renounces any duty to examine the facts on the ground.
Here's one difference between the two situations. In Ukraine, it was
extremely hard to learn exactly what the evidence of fraudulence actually
was. In Mexico, it is extremely easy. That is because the Mexican electoral
authority, known as IFE, posted the ongoing count on its website in real
time, an initiative called PREP. Independent scholars kept a record of PREP
as the night progressed. A statistical analysis of that record does not, of
course, constitute proof. But it brings to mind Henry David Thoreau's remark
that circumstantial evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in
the milk.
To begin with, a simple matter. According to an article by Roberto
González Amador in La Jornada, the vote totals don't match the percentages
reported. Given the just over 15 million votes Calderón was said to have
earned, the percentage reported for him, 35.89%, could only be obtained by
including invalid ballots in the total reported. If, on the other hand, one
takes the overall vote total and the percentage reported for Calderón as
correct, then his total vote must have been substantially less than was
reported.
The same is true for AMLO and the other candidates, and there is a
total shortfall of over a million votes between what can be justified by the
official percentages of the valid votes, and the sum of votes reported. The
discrepancy proves nothing, but even if it is only a simple error, it
certainly seems to cast doubt over the competence of the count.
Let's turn to the harder stuff. An analysis by the physicist Luis
Mochán of UNAM based on the realtime evolution of the vote count and the
distribution of vote totals by polling place can be found here, and in
greater detail in Spanish, here. It's not easy reading, but is immensely
worthwhile. It's possible that Mochán's work inaugurates a new era in
realtime checking for vote fraud, made possible by the simplicity of
Mexico's first-past-the-post direct vote and the rich electoral data sets
that can be made instantly available. Call it the age of transparency, in
collision with an oligarchy of thugs.
Mochán's work calls attention to at least four important anomalies in
the count.
1. Calderón's percentage lead in the count started at around seven
percentage points, and diminished steadily in percentage terms through the
first part of the count. This corresponded to a remarkably constant absolute
differential between Calderón and AMLO as the count progressed. Is this
normal? The count depended on the arrival of the boxes; if this were
absolutely random then the proportions should have held roughly constant
while absolute differentials widened, as actually happened to the
differential between Calderón and the third major candidate, Madrazo of the
PRI, for most of the evening. Why did the Calderón-AMLO differential follow
a different rule?
2. The PREP results went on view only after the first 10,000 boxes had
been processed. If those first 10,000 boxes resembled what came later, then
extrapolating backward should produce a line intersecting the origin - each
candidate should have started with zero votes. For Calderón this is the
case, but for AMLO it is not: the AMLO intercept is actually at minus
126,000 votes. Thus, the first 10,000 boxes were markedly different from
those that followed. How?
3. There are gross anomalies in the number of votes counted per
five-minute interval as the count finishes. Over the course of the evening,
the pattern of vote counts set a normal range for this variable. As the last
boxes came in, however, it was radically violated, with many more votes
piled in, per interval, than was normal before. Moreover, toward the very
end, PREP reset the box count, which regressed from 127,936 at 13.17 on July
3 to 127,713 at 13.50, meaning that records for 223 boxes disappeared. 33
minutes had by then passed with no updates. When they resumed, there were
updates with absurd results: more than 6000 votes per box at 13:57, and then
updates with large negative votes per box at 13:57 and 14:03.
4. From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of
votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is. But for
Calderón and AMLO it isn't. In Calderón's case, the distribution appears to
be shifted out, with the shift localized among the last 40,000 boxes
counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution tails off abruptly from its
peak. It is in the difference between the slightly fat distribution for
Calderón and the shaved distribution for AMLO that the difference in the
final outcome is to be found. A graph of the differences in Calderón and
AMLO's votes per box, which ought to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a
certain range, Calderón's margins appear abnormally large.
Professor Mochán does not claim to explain these anomalies. More time
and closer investigation remain necessary. But he does conclude that it "is
reasonable to suspect that there could have been a manipulation of the
results reported by the PREP." It is true that the PREP is not an official
count - that was done at the district offices, with equally serious
anomalies alleged. But PREP reported the box-by-box results as they flowed
in-and as such it constitutes a vital instrument for the detection of
patterns of manipulation and fraud.
Let me go further than Mochán. The evidence he assembles is consistent
with the following possibilities:
1. That Felipe Calderón started the night with an advantage in total
votes, a gift from the authorities.
2. That as the count progressed this advantage was maintained by
misreporting of the actual results. This enabled Calderón to claim that he
had led through the entire process - an argument greatly repeated but
spurious in any case because it is only the final count that matters.
3. That toward the end of the count, further adjustments were made to
support the appearance of a victory by Calderón.
Add these elements together, and there is no reason to accept the
almost universal view that the election was close. AMLO might have won by a
mile.
If you want sound and color, there's plenty of that too: actual tally
sheets showing that votes counted for AMLO were reduced, taped
conspiratorial telephone conversations, videotapes that may or may not show
guilty behavior; the endorsement of Calderón by Fox; the inclusion of PAN
themes in corporate advertising. As a Mexican correspondent writes, "the
fraud is a p-r-o-c-e-s-s." In late news, La Jornada on July 16 charges that
40% of the vote packets have been illegally reopened by the IFE since the
election. This amounts to a pre-emptive strike against the credibility of
any recount. The charges, if true, are tantamount to proof of fraud,
evidence prima facie that AMLO won the election.
Is it time to move on? The numbers suggest otherwise. By demonstrating
the possibility of detecting fraud before the results of an election are
officially decided, they also inaugurate a new phase in the struggle for the
recognition of a democratic vote. The Mexican people, who marched through
their capital today, appear determined to carry that struggle forward until
justice is won. Unlike the so-called Democratic Party in the United States
six years back, Andres Manuel López Obrador appears, for now, determined not
to compromise with fraud.
And for those of us outside Mexico, we must decide where we stand:
with democracy ... or quietly on the sidelines?
James K Galbraith holds the Lloyd M Bentsen Jr chair of
government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson school of public
affairs, the University of Texas at Austin, and a professorship in
government. He is a senior scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, and
chair of the board of Economists for Peace and Security, an international
association of professional economists.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
###
There's no doubt the Mexican election was rigged by American interests.
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| User: "isopropyl methylphosphonofluoridate" |
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| Title: Re: Doing Maths In Mexico |
19 Jul 2006 12:57:39 PM |
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Jor-el© wrote...
4. From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of
votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is. But for
Calderón and AMLO it isn't. In Calderón's case, the distribution appears to
be shifted out, with the shift localized among the last 40,000 boxes
counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution tails off abruptly from its
peak. It is in the difference between the slightly fat distribution for
Calderón and the shaved distribution for AMLO that the difference in the
final outcome is to be found. A graph of the differences in Calderón and
AMLO's votes per box, which ought to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a
certain range, Calderón's margins appear abnormally large.
One book I read had the author describing the concept of Mexican statistics
as poetry. Like the inflation and unemployment rates, the election results
are simply an ideal, and do not reflect reality in any way.
Making the problem worse is the fact that all sides rigged the election.
All parties stuffed as many ballot boxes as possible, so all the recounts in
the world won't make any difference. And no matter which party forged the
most ballots, the results will be the same; the Mexican people will be fucked
in the ***** and the profits of their labors stolen and laundered into secret
Swiss bank accounts.
I especially like how the presumed winning PAN candidate appears to be a clone
of the winning 1988 PRI candidate, a balding, middle-aged man with a degree
from Harvard. Like the 1988 candidate, he is described as a reformist whose
education and pro-business policies are sure to help Mexico (the 1988
candidate went on to loot the country).
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"'Eso era la escuela. La construyeron en las épocas de Tata Cárdenas
pero, cuando cambió el gobierno al maestro dejaron de pagarle y un
día se fue. Lo de siempre, licenciado.'
'Bueno, pero żlas puertas, las ventanas y todo lo demás?'
'Eso fue cosa de uno de sus colegas. El muy canijo, un día decidió
venderlas junto con el pizarrón, las bancas y todo lo que había de
valor. Si no vendió los adobes, fue porque no encontró quien se los
comprara. Si hubiera encontrado a quien venderle el pueblo entero,
lo hubiera hecho'"
-- Herod's Law
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