JALISCO - A campaign to persuade citizens to deliberately spoil their ballots in the upcoming July 5 midterm elections is proving to be divisive.
“Candidates try to make you think you have choice,” says 26-year-old translator Lilian Alvarez, who says she will spoil her ballots in next month’s election. “But it’s the same old idiots. The population needs to say something.”
Support for groups such as Anulo mi Voto appear to be strong among younger voters but establishment figures, including Guadalajara Archbishop Juan Sandoval, say absenteeism and deliberate ballot spoiling “kills” democracy.
The allegations of fraud in the 2006 presidential election, the perceived lack of change in the political system since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were dethroned in 2000 and the economic/drug war/swine flu crises that have swept Mexico appear to have done nothing to endear youth to politicians.
“For void politicians, void votes,” reads the slogan of Anulo mi Voto.
“There is no direct contact between the candidates and the public,” says David Figueroa, a literature student at the Universidad de Guadalajara (U de G). “We should participate, but we feel alienated from the political parties and system – that’s why I am going to spoil my ballot.”
In a simulated vote done at five U de G campuses in the past two weeks, void, spoiled or blank ballots came in third, behind the PAN and PRI, with around ten percent of the “vote.”
“We find ourselves totally disillusioned by the political class and because of that we wanted to join forces to combat the malaise that we all share: the monopoly of power in the hands of the parties,” Jesus Soto, in charge of internet affairs for the Anulo mi Voto campaign, told the Reporter. “If ten percent of citizens decide to annul their vote it will have demonstrated the great social discontent people have with the political class. The difference between this and abstaining is that annulling can’t be wrongly interpreted.”
The campaign advocates putting a massive cross, not in the box of the candidate you wish to elect but across the whole of the ballot paper, to show rejection of all the candidates.
The vote spoilers have even found support from some surprising quarters.
Dulce Maria Sauri, a former president of the PRI and ex governor of Yucatan, appears in YouTube videos explaining to people why annulling the vote is a good option and urging them to write “Asi no” on the ballot paper.
“You may ask yourself how it’s possible that I’m promoting ballot spoiling,” she says in one video. “ Well, my long political career has allowed me to get to know first hand how the structure of electoral and political control was formed.”
Sauri goes on to explain at length how political interest groups act above the law and basically control everything that happens in Mexico.
Much of the criticism for the vote spoiling campaign has come from leftists. Former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador believes it will simply aid the bigger and well-established parties, especially in their strongholds.
“Annulling denounces an unjust representative system,” contests Soto. “If the hard vote reinforces these parties it is because the system that we have is totally unjust and unequal.”
In multi-party systems such as Canada and Western Europe, a common argument is that you should vote for the least repulsive candidate, but Sergio Sarmiento, writing in his column in Reforma, disagreed this has an equivalent in Mexico: “Given the level of corruption and ineptness of our political class, you might as well look for a needle in a haystack.”
He added that the combination of people not voting and annulling must be above the 59 percent it reached in the 2003 midterm elections to provoke a reaction from political parties. The reality is that the success of the Anulo mi Voto campaign will be judged by the percent of people who actually turn up to deliberately spoil their ballots on July 5.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
