The electoral reform initiative proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador involves a radical restructuring of a political system that has been taking shape over decades in Mexico. The constitutional changes would modify the party system, which would now tend towards bipartisanship. To elect the representatives in the Chambers of Congress, direct voting would be set aside and a list scheme would be introduced, and the powers of the institutions in charge of organizing the elections and imparting electoral justice would be centralized in single national bodies, which, in turn, they will have a smaller infrastructure. The central argument of the presidential proposal is to lower the costs of the electoral system. The initiative proposes to reform 18 articles of the Constitution, and its approval requires the vote of two thirds of Congress.
Election of election officials by direct vote
One of the most striking modifications has been that the electoral councilors and magistrates are elected by the citizen vote. Currently, the Chamber of Deputies appoints the advisors of the National Electoral Institute (INE) and its president. The Senate is responsible for selecting the magistrates of the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF). López Obrador’s project proposes that the members of these bodies be voted on by the citizens as of 2023, which would mean revoking various electoral officials who have not yet completed the period for which they were appointed.
In the case of the INE, it is proposed to reduce the number of directors from 11 to seven. Citizens will be able to elect the new counselors and magistrates from among lists of candidates formulated by the President of the Republic, the Legislature and the Supreme Court of Justice. There will be 60 candidates in the case of the INE and 30 in the case of the Electoral Tribunal. Each official will be in office for six years. The person with the most votes among the candidates for directors will preside over the institute and the presidency of the Electoral Court will be decided among the members of the plenary.
Transformation of the INE and the Electoral Tribunal
The initiative proposes the transformation of the National Electoral Institute (INE) into a new National Institute for Elections and Consultations (INEC). With the change, the 32 local electoral institutes (OPLE), which were created in 2014 to organize state elections, would be eliminated, and the INEC would become the sole authority to organize all elections, both federal and local. It would also organize the popular consultations and revocation of the mandate. The proposal proposes to also eliminate the local electoral courts, in charge of the dispatch of matters related to state elections. The reform project indicates that both the INE and the TEPJF usually take on the tasks of local bodies: the INE organizes more and more state elections and the Electoral Tribunal reviews the sentences issued at the local level and issues the last word.
“The INE, from its creation to date, has increasingly exercised its power of attraction over the functions of the OPLEs, to the point of carrying out or verifying practically all the significant activities that formally correspond to said bodies, except for research and substantiation of complaints; the registration of candidates, calculations and declaration of validity. Having a single administrative authority will contribute to providing greater certainty and harmonizing the electoral processes and citizen participation”, says the bill. “We must add the irrelevance of the local courts in electoral matters: as a first instance, they do not provide certainty to the electoral processes. The Judicial Power of the Federation resolves definitively almost any contested act of the local elections. For this reason, it is proposed that the TEPJF absorb the country’s local electoral controversies”.
Eliminate the 300 electoral districts and have fewer legislators
President López Obrador has spread the idea that his reform project seeks to eliminate multi-member legislators. Actually, his initiative proposes to keep the figure, but change its implementation. Currently the country is divided into 300 electoral districts and five constituencies made up of several states. Of the 500 deputies that make up the lower house, 300 are elected by direct vote in those districts, and another 200 are appointed by “proportional representation” through regional lists. Thus, the votes obtained by direct vote serve as the basis for distributing more places to the parties from the lists. These are the so-called plurinominal legislators or plural. Although this scheme grants more legislators to the majority forces, it also guarantees that minority parties –and the citizens who voted for them– have representation in Congress. In the case of the Senate, of the 128 representatives that make up the Upper House, 32 are proportional representation (plurinominal).
López Obrador has proposed disappearing the division into electoral districts and constituencies and, consequently, the possibility of having legislators elected through those lists. This would reduce the number of deputies to 300 and senators to 96. However, it does not mean that those legislators will be elected by the direct vote that currently exists. On the contrary, he proposes that now the candidates be proposed through lists by each of the 32 states, similar to the US model. The distribution of deputies and senators would be given by crossing the population density and the votes obtained by each party in the contest. A state with a larger population would have a larger number of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies. Thus, the State of Mexico would contribute 40 deputies; Mexico City, 22; Jalisco, 20, and Veracruz, 19. In contrast, Baja California Sur, Campeche and Colima would contribute two deputies each. In those States, precisely, the new rules would favor the majority party and the second place, since there will not be enough places to distribute the minority parties, which, in fact, favors the formation of a bipartisanship.
The formation of state congresses and town councils would follow the same criteria of population density. The local legislatures would be constituted based on the population of the municipalities or mayors of the State in question, with a minimum of 15 deputies and a maximum of 45. The elimination of the 300 electoral districts would also imply a reduction in the structure of the INE, which has Executive Boards in each of these territories.
Eliminate ordinary public funding for parties
That the public financing of the parties prevails over private financing is one of the pillars of the Mexican electoral system. Currently, the Constitution establishes a formula by which public spending is distributed to the parties every year. In election years, public spending increases, as they are given additional budget to campaign. López Obrador’s initiative proposes to eliminate ordinary financing and that resources are only assigned to them when there are elections: a greater expense when senators and president of the Republic are elected, and a lower one when deputies are voted. In non-electoral periods, the parties must cover their expenses through contributions from their sympathizers and militants.
The amount of private financing that the parties could receive is not clear in the proposal, but some restrictions are established for individuals who make contributions. “The resources provided will not be tax deductible; It is prohibited for the same natural person to donate in a year to more than one party or independent candidacy, and for resources obtained to support ordinary activities to be applied to campaign expenses or to the payment of debts contracted to cover previous electoral processes.”
Facilitate popular queries
Currently, in order for the results of a referendum or a referendum to revoke the mandate to be binding –mandatory–, it is required that at least 40% of the nominal list of people with voting credentials participate in the exercise. The figure is equivalent to about 37 million people, a difficult figure to reach given the level of abstentionism that characterizes the Mexican elections. 17.77% of citizens participated in the recent consultation exercise to revoke López Obrador’s mandate; the figure was even lower, 7%, in the popular consultation of 2021 that was promoted to open investigations against former officials. The initiative proposes lowering the threshold for the results of citizen consultations to be binding to 33% of the nominal list.
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