Citizen Participation in the Voting Booths during the 2006 Presidential Election in Mexico: the Coexistence of Democratic Commitment with Arithmetic Errors

Abstract

During the Mexican presidential elections, in July 2 2006, the citizens that took part in the direction of the different voting booths, made a large quantity of arithmetic mistakes during the physical counting and review of the votes; nevertheless, these errors were distributed practically the same in both Calderon (58.2% of 59, 042 voting booths) and AMLO (61.2% of 54, 020) support.

Such correspondence between the leaders of the election can only be explained by the random and involuntary nature of the mistakes as a whole, this, because it is impossible, from a practical point of view, the construction of a strategy to alter the count of votes in favor or against any of the candidates that would had operated simultaneously in both types of voting boots and that it had provoked errors in the same way and percentage.