Mexico’s Electoral Institute designs the consultation to recall the president

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) approved this Friday (27) the guidelines and budget for the organization of the referendum to revoke the presidential mandate. However, there is still no law regulating it.

The president of INE, Lorenzo Córdova, explained that the consultation to revoke the presidential mandate would be held in March 2022 with a budget of 3.83 billion pesos (US$189.6 million).

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Among the approved guidelines is the installation of more than 161,000 voting tables and 484,000 polling officials, in addition to hiring electoral supervisors and trainers.

Also considered is the possibility of online voting for Mexicans living abroad and the recount on the same day of Election Day, and the implementation of a quick projection of results that same night.

It was established that political parties might broadcast the referendum as long as they do not use public resources for such purpose, nor hire propaganda on radio and television, which is forbidden by the Constitution.

However, they may use the spaces assigned as prerogatives to state their position on the revocation of mandate.

In particular, the proposals of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to include the possibility of verifying the organizations that will carry out the survey was rejected.

INE approved this design despite the fact that Congress has not yet given the green light to the law that should regulate this exercise.

In 2019, Congress reformed the Constitution to open the possibility of holding consultations to revoke the president’s mandate. Still, a regulatory law has not yet been approved: the Electoral Court ordered it to do so within one month.

The ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) intends this to be the first initiative to be debated at the beginning of the next legislature on September 1.

The president of INE clarified this Friday that the guidelines for the consultation were approved to remedy the fact that Congress has not yet legislated it.

INE had already confronted Congress in the past when it considered that it did not grant it enough budget to carry out the consultation on prosecuting the country’s former presidents on August 1, in which only 7% of the census voted.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants to call a referendum so that Mexicans may decide whether or not he should remain in office next year. Still, the opposition stopped the call for an extraordinary session in Congress to legislate on the matter.

Opponents denounce that the president wants to waste money with this type of exercise, which allows him to be in permanent campaign.

The mid-term recall referendum is one of the electoral promises of López Obrador, president since 2018, purportedly to suppress privileges and foster direct democracy in Mexico.