Professor Persily Tells Mexico Electronic Voting Not the Cure-All for their Election Battles

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New York, October 20, 2009 – The hotly contested presidential election in Mexico in 2006 was rife with charges of voting fraud and problems at polling stations.

 

After two months of court challenges, public protests, and recounts, Felipe Calderón was declared the narrow winner over Andres Manuel López Obrador. But the bitterness over that race left its mark. It launched a dialogue on electoral reform, which continued last week in Xalapa, capital of the state of Veracruz, with Nathaniel Persily, the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science, and one of the leading election-law experts in the U.S.

 

Persily was a featured speaker at a forum sponsored by the Electoral Institute of Veracruz. “We ended up talking a lot about electronic voting,” Persily said.

 

Mexico currently uses paper ballots in national and local elections, and has started to explore certain methods of electronic voting as a way to avoid the problems encountered in 2006.

The last election, Persily said, pointed out the need to improve public confidence in elections and provide greater transparency over how votes are cast. At the same time, though, he noted that eliminating paper ballots has merit, but it is hardly a cure-all.

 

“If citizens are concerned that corrupt officials are in charge of counting votes, then moving toward a different technology for voting will not remove those concerns," Persily said, adding that the benefits of electronic voting can also be erased if there are not enough machines to record ballots and poll workers are not adequately trained.

Still, Persily told the audience in Xalapa that electronic voting has many potential benefits for Mexico, such as decreasing the potential for voter errors and centralizing the vote counting and collection process,
 

“There are many countries that have moved to electronic voting with few problems,” Persily said, “and it is not the case that developing countries are less able to handle the technical challenges than the developed ones.”

 

However, Persily said he was in Veracruz not to endorse electronic voting but merely to outline its benefits and pitfalls.

 

With a nod to the disputed vote count in Florida in the 2000 election, Persily said, “I think it’s wrong for Americans to come down to Mexico and advocate that they change their electoral system.”

 

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