With outrageous audacity, the US Congress has assumed the role of overseeing our nation’s electoral system through the hypocritical and unethical claim that President Biden, in a flagrant violation of our sovereignty, prosecutes Mexico’s internal legislative decisions. It would not be fair to mention this ridiculous effort if it were not for the fact that we must always be careful to disallow any interventionist motives from our neighbors. The epithets I have used are fully justified as the attitude of these Congressmen reveals a lack of moral authority and hypocrisy bordering on the ridiculous. It is unheard of that they appraise our model of electoral organization, – which conforms to ours only to define – when they have not been able to create their own model that even comes close to our advantages. With what face do they dare to suggest that legislative reform supersede the National Electoral Authority, if they lack that type of institution?
They should be ashamed that their organization of elections is one of the most chaotic, unsafe, unfair and undemocratic in the Western world. First, they lack a national voter ID card system. Like us, they do not have a register in which all citizens who go to the polls are registered. Since the registry is scattered throughout all fifty states, there is substantial potential for multiple registrations and a complete lack of domicile control. Citizens’ lack of trust in this mechanism is demonstrated by the fact, which seems unbelievable, that citizens refuse to be identified on the lists for the registration process, because they believe it is a way the government can take care of them. seeks to obstruct the right to vote, a sentiment that is especially present among minorities.
The chaos and mistrust is exacerbated by the lack of certainty in the issuing and handling of votes that may be received in person several days before Election Day or through the postal system. Such methods have been questioned by American politicians themselves given the vulnerability they present to fraudulent practices.
Added to this chaos is the lack of a uniform ballot format nationwide, to the extent that ballots can differ between neighboring countries; Situation that gave rise to serious allegations of fraud in the 2000 presidential election.
It is noteworthy that given the importance of the autonomy of the national body controlling elections, they have not been able to legislate to create something similar in the United States. In that country, the electoral power is precisely the government. In states managed separately under separate laws, it is the secretaries of government who report to the governors who are in charge of validating the results of elections. They always act as judge and party. If, as the US State Department asserts, free electoral institutions are “the cornerstone of democracy”, because they do not have such institutions, we must conclude that their system is undemocratic. Nor do they have an independent judicial body specialized in electoral matters to settle disputes.
The undemocratic height of the system is the fact that the candidate who is defeated in the election can win the presidency of the country. Given the indirect election process, in which citizens do not vote directly for the president, but for a group of intermediate electors, which are distributed among the states in proportion to their population, the low vote in two of the last 5 presidential elections Was the candidate. Elected Presidents: George W. Bush in 2000, who had fewer votes than Al Gore, and in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost despite accumulating more votes than Trump. By the way, in the 2000 election, the state that determined Bush’s victory was Florida, governed by his brother, who reported to the secretary of government announcing Bush’s victory. Despite the fact that the recount was challenged in that state, the Supreme Court, not a special electoral tribunal as operates in Mexico, awarded a 5 to 4 victory to Republican Bush, with the justices concurring. The Republican current defeated those sympathetic to the Democrats. A detailed account of these and other outrages in the electoral process in the United States can be found in my book Deficiencies in the North American Electoral System, published by UNAM’s Legal Research Institute.
Fussy US Congressmen should do the work of removing the huge beam from their own eye before they look for straws in others.
