Politics: A System that Remains Broken
The handling by the national electoral authority of the most recent elections, especially those of Coahuila and the State of Mexico, provides ample evidence of the gravest problems plaguing electoral democracy in Mexico: ignoring campaign spending limits, the willingness of all political parties to break the rules and find legal loopholes through which to break campaign laws with impunity, and a system of electoral arbiters who are too weak to punish such violations.
Spending excesses appeared to be on an unprecedented scale, in part because of the stratospheric spending limits set by the local authorities. In the State of Mexico's gubernatorial race, with 11.3 million people registered to vote, the authorities approved a cap of 285 million pesos per campaign, five times more than what the INE calculates should be the limit for the 2018 presidential election, with almost 90 million registered voters. And with only four states having held elections last month, political parties under-reported spending by 364 million pesos, more than 450% greater than the 77.3 million pesos in under-reporting detected in 2016’s 12 state elections.
At the same time, the electoral arbiter’s image was badly tarnished once again by poor handling of its spending probe in Coahuila – it initially reported that the PRI had surpassed the cap by 31.1% and the PAN by 26.6%, and later scaled those figures back to 7.86% and 4.95%, respectively – and lack of policy for properly making its decisions public, which were as likely to be leaked by individual INE councilors through their social media accounts as through any official statements.
Ultimately everyone involved, including electoral authorities at the state level, must deal with the underlying problems, and above all, should the political parties in Congress, who approve such convoluted laws that are packed with loopholes everyone manages to exploit with almost total impunity.
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