Letter from Mexico

Diana and I live “there”: Oaxaca, Mexico. We are legal residents of California (“here”), and we vote, as do hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, by absentee ballot. We are also temporary residents of Mexico, where, since we are not citizens, we are not allowed to vote.

Millions of Mexicans live here, and in other countries, as temporary residents and as naturalized citizens. Mexicans do not—as we do—lose the privileges of their citizenship when they become citizens of another country. Like us, they are not allowed to vote in the country to which they have moved until they achieve citizenship. Unlike us, until recently, they could not vote unless they returned to their birth-country to do so. And even then, they often find the bureaucratic roadblocks to exercising their franchise to be daunting if not insurmountable.
First, “they” must be able to prove they exist. This means coming up with a birth certificate, something which “we” have filed for us by the hospital or attending physician when we are born. Not so for Mexicans, many born at home in out-of-the-way villages run by volunteer councils and lacking the sort of bureaucratic structures that we take for granted. The nearest registry may be located at the end of a four hour walk followed by a long bus ride, a lengthy and expensive sojourn—for these folk, many of whom will never get much further than the next village, a daunting and low priority affair.

Without a birth certificate, children can’t be admitted to school, young adult males can’t serve in the army. Without a certificate of service, young men may not vote, be employed in all but the most casual and menial jobs, or get a passport.

Reconstructing the materials necessary for receiving a birth certificate can be a full-time job for weeks, and cost dearly for bribes, copying, certifications, etc.

Even assuming—as is true for most Mexicans—that all the papers are in order, voting credentials may be difficult to come by. This is partly the result of bureaucratic indifference, and partly due to the ballot-box wars that go on between those in power and those seeking power. Electoral shenanigans were happening here long before Florida and Ohio (not to mention Chicago under Daley, etc.). One ploy is to “lose” the voting credential that is necessary for access to a voting booth, before it ever gets from the central electoral authority to the mail box. Somehow, non-PRI voters' credentials seem to disappear at an astonishingly higher rate.

Mexicans have been agitating for the right to vote absentee for decades. The PRI, the longest running single-party government in modern times (some have dubbed it “the perfect dictatorship”) until its defeat in the presidential election of 2000, embraced the concept publicly, and privately made sure that the concept never grew into reality. The reason, according to some political pundits, was twofold: Campesinos, once exposed to the more liberal attitudes in “el Norte,” might think to vote against the PRI; and stuffing the ballot box (among other dirty tricks) might be a good deal more difficult to hide.

Pressure had been building steadily on behalf of the absentee ballot, and with the election of an “opposition” president who favored it, the absentee ballot finally became mandated by law about a year ago. Now it is in the “distribution” stage, and that is proving to be quite a thorny problem. Nobody trusts the mails, so mailing ballots to absent voters is out. That leaves voters with one likely option (understand that none of this is settled yet): pick one's ballot up at some form of official polling station, vote it there, and deposit it in a box when done. The most likely voting places are the embassy and consulates and sub-consulates in the host countries. While this is fine for voters working near—to take California as an example—the consulates in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the sub-consulate in Fresno, it poses a problem for those who work in San Luis Obispo, over on the coast, for instance; and is unthinkably difficult for a worker in a chicken processing plant in rural Arkansas.

So, assuming that a resident Mexican has their up-to-date voter card; and assuming that getting to a voting place is not prohibitively difficult; and assuming (no small assumption, since as of today, the Federal Election Commission is yet to nail down a set of procedures) that the physical ballots, a method of checking the genuine-ness of a voter card, and a method to have them delivered to the counting places in Mexico in a secure and timely manner is in place, you can see that only a small percentage of the people meant to be covered by the new initiative are likely to actually take the trouble to vote. But that's not the only impediment.

The Federal Elections Commission has interpreted the Mexican Constitution in such a way as to prohibit all candidates, and all parties, from crossing the border to inform, cajole or flim-flam voters for their vote. No campaign literature, no radio or TV spots, and no personal appearances by the candidates or by anyone claiming to represent them. The penalty for violating these prohibitions is disqualification. Recently, PRD front-runner (for his party's nomination and for the presidency) Andres Manuel López Obrador had to cancel a trip to Los Angeles to meet with mayor Villaragoza because his advisors feared that such a meeting could result in his removal from the race.

So, not only is it difficult to become a voter, and probably difficult to vote, but one of the chief motivations for becoming interested in the process—being able to see the candidate in person, judge for oneself his demeanor and honesty—as now been removed. Even so, given the burgeoning Spanish language newspaper and magazine industry, and the solid coverage of Mexican politics on such Latin networks as Univision, the turnout “here” will likely be higher than our turnout “there.” And, like all the small but significant improvements in Mexican politics, hard-fought and protracted fights every one, this too will, in the long run, be one more step on the road to true democracy in a country that has yearned for—and struggled for—democracy, since before the “revolution” of 1910 that promised it.