Waging Peace:  Mexico

Monitoring Elections

In July 2000, a Carter Center delegation, led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Bolivia President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, witnessed a historic transition of power ending 71 years of rule by one party. As election observers for more than a decade in Mexico, the Carter Center's Americas Program and its Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Americas were honored to have been invited to observe an internationally significant presidential race alongside major Mexican political parties and the government.

Since 1986, the Americas Program has tracked Mexico's elections informally and has sent five monitoring missions since 1992. On each of the visits, the Center observed election preparations and the implementation of electoral law. The Center made suggestions for improvements to electoral authorities, who were open to the comments as they strove to overcome past problems and transform Mexican politics.
In June 2000, the program sent a team to assess campaign conditions. It heard reports of political parties attempting to buy or intimidate voters as well as criticisms of biased news media coverage favoring the ruling PRI party.

However, overall the team found campaigning conditions consistent with the preparation of a free election and afterward pronounced the elections as near perfect. A successful election was possible because of significant electoral reforms in the past decade, including the creation of the autonomous Federal Election Institute, state-of-the-art voter identification cards, and an electoral court to rule on disputes and certify results.

The Americas Program also commissioned the report "Electoral Justice in Mexico: From Oxymoron to Legal Norm in Less Than a Decade" by Todd Eisenstadt, assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. The report concluded that between 1988 and 1998, electoral courts increased their autonomy and professionalism, while political parties improved their technical capacity to document electoral problems.