Politics: Highly questioned Judicial Reform validation—prelude to a more opaque election model?
The June 2 Judicial Election was questioned from the word go. It was criticized as a logistical nightmare with voters having to decide between hundreds of unknown candidates, with severely restricted limits on campaigning, and perhaps most importantly, the danger that the public electing the judiciary and in the process politicizing the entire process could put an end to the independence and autonomy of the judicial branch.
On August 20 the Federal Electoral Tribunal ruled on the validity of the election. Reyes Rodríguez Mondragón, a Federal Electoral Tribunal magistrate and the jurist responsible for preparing the resolution on the election’s legitimacy, proposed its annulment after analyzing all of the various irregularities that occurred during the process and on election day itself. The main reason he gave centered on the use of printed and digital fold-out voter guides known as “accordions”, which were massively distributed both in numerical and geographical terms. While the distribution of the “accordions” with their de-facto illegal slates violated electoral legislation on multiple levels, questions were also raised—who was behind the whole scheme, how was it financed, and by whom? Suspicions naturally fell on Morena and the government. Unsurprisingly, there was a perfect correlation between the names on the accordions and the candidates elected. In other words, they were the decisive factor in determining the election’s outcome.
However, despite the proposal to annul the elections, a narrow majority of justices, aligned with the Fourth Transformation, rejected the motion on the flimsiest of grounds. They argued that the resolution failed to present proof of who was behind the accordions’ creation and distribution and who financed the whole operation.
For his part, Rodriguez Mondragon argued that it was not his responsibility to undertake such an investigation and that the absence of data on who was behind the operation did not invalidate the fact that electoral laws were violated.
On September 1, the new Supreme Court will be sworn in along with other judicial bodies. A new period will thus begin, with the courts subjected to the government’s political dictates. In addition, President Sheinbaum is proposing an electoral reform that, among other points, seeks to massively cut funding for the elections. How this will affect the 2027 mid-term elections remains to be seen, but the outlook does not look promising.
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