Trust in elections: Mexico shows how fast it can be lost – and regained

Donning a black suit and a red, green, and white presidential sash, the man raised his right hand and swore his allegiance to the Mexican people as their “legitimate president.” A crowd of tens of thousands of supporters packed into the historic Zócalo plaza to hear him.

The problem? He had lost the election months earlier.

Perhaps one of the most infamous cases of a defeated presidential candidate claiming fraud and refusing to concede, for nearly two months in 2006 Andrés Manuel López Obrador organized protests and encampments in downtown Mexico City, driving the capital to a halt and feeding distrust in the electoral system. He’d lost by just a 0.56 percentage point, and his request for a total recount was denied by the top electoral court. Voter confidence in the electoral institute plummeted by nearly 20 percentage points to 43% by 2008.

But today, as political figures from Donald Trump in the United States to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil cast doubts on their electoral systems, Mexico’s National Electoral Institute, known as INE, is one of the most trusted civilian-run institutions in the country.

And in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. or threats from President Bolsonaro that he will not accept electoral results if he loses in Brazil’s Oct. 2 race, the aftermath of Mexico’s deeply contested 2006 vote may offer some important lessons on maintaining – or regaining – citizen trust in elections. Mr. López Obrador eventually backed down, running for president twice more and finally winning by a landslide in 2018. He’s halfway through his six-year term, and INE has nearly 70% public trust.

Mexico’s democracy isn’t often held up as an example to follow, especially “given that it’s become one of the most violent democracies in the world,” says Guillermo Trejo, professor of comparative politics at the University of Notre Dame. “But, on the electoral dimension, there are lessons for other countries.”

“One was to create an election management system that is really well-known, well-funded, and that works well,” he says. “Until recently in the U.S., no one knew who was organizing elections, who was in charge. In Mexico, everyone knows.”

Reforms at the top

For the past eight years, Lorenzo Córdova Vianello has been the one in charge.

On a recent morning, the president of INE ticks off the changes the body has undergone in an effort to regain voter trust – from a more proactive communications approach that includes combating fake news to a sophisticated identification card system that most citizens rely on – to avoid a repeat of 2006.

Widespread reforms to the electoral institute in 2007 and 2014 turned it into a national body with centralized control over all elections, including electoral training, voter registration, and auditing campaign spending. The reforms also prohibited anyone – parties, citizens, private companies, and others – from buying radio and TV airtime (parties get free government-regulated time on radio and TV) in an effort to address allegations that “third parties” were spreading misinformation about President López Obrador in the lead-up to the 2006 vote.

But regaining citizen trust went beyond legal reforms, Dr. Córdova says. “The INE is present in the wallets and the bags of all Mexicans over the age of 18,” he says, referring to the voter ID card that serves as one of the most commonly used forms of identification in the country. The name recognition – and confidence that personal, biometric data is kept safe by INE – translates to a baseline comfort with the institute that exists before anyone even walks into a polling booth on election day, he says.

INE also struck deals with major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to monitor and correct misinformation.

“If the [U.S.] electoral system is founded on trust,” says Dr. Córdova, whose nine-year, congressionally appointed term ends next year, “the Mexican electoral system is based on mistrust.”

Mexico has a long history of political control by one party, the PRI. Incidents like a 1988 election where an opposition candidate was in the lead – until the power went out – are etched in the nation’s collective memory as evidence that corrupt people in power have always been able to manipulate results for their own benefit.

“All these numerous rules, conditions, prohibitions, they have been demanded to combat the distrust,” Mr. Córdova says.

Counting ballots together

Marco Fernández was selected through the INE lottery system to serve as a citizen poll worker during the June 2021 midterm elections. That meant attending training sessions in the lead-up to the vote, setting up the polling station with a handful of neighbors, and overseeing and assisting the voting process – including counting ballots – on election day. The professor in the school of government at Tec de Monterrey says this tradition of having citizens run polling stations, which began in the late 1990s as a response to earlier threats to democracy, is one of the aspects of Mexican elections that continues to build the most trust.

“Undoubtedly Mexicans trust their peers more than their leadership,” says Dr. Fernández, the anti-corruption program coordinator at the think tank México Evalúa.

As political polarization grows, Dr. Trejo says having neighbors with different political beliefs randomly selected to work together to help their community vote could serve as an antidote. “Maybe they get to know each other a little better. Maybe they’re able to put some of their differences aside, organize an election by the book, and contribute, in a way, to mitigate polarization,” he says. Being tapped to run a polling station is something he sees as a point of pride for Mexicans, bringing the population together in a way you rarely see, except, perhaps, following natural disasters. “You see levels of citizen engagement and duty to community,” Dr. Trejo says.

“Anything could happen”

Valeria Metz, who runs a boutique PR firm in Mexico City, voted in her first presidential election in 2006, casting her ballot for Mr. López Obrador. When he took to the Zócalo calling for every ballot in every voting station to be recounted, she and her mother eagerly joined the protests, walking through the crowds and feeling a sense of civic duty.

But by the time he backed down, she was so disillusioned that she didn’t even bother voting in 2012. By 2018, her vote helped Mr. López Obrador clinch a landslide presidential victory. “The INE has changed and improved” since 2006, Ms. Metz explains. “But Mexicans, we know anything could happen. We’ve seen candidates killed, elections robbed, organized crime influencing politics,” she says. “We are a country of impunity, and that’s our biggest problem.”

President López Obrador’s 2018 victory – as well as the many victories of his Morena party on the national and local stages in the years since – has given the INE an added boost of legitimacy among former critics.

But the president himself still distrusts the body. He rails against the election authority in his daily press conferences and last spring proposed a handful of amendments that he claims would end electoral fraud and finally transform the country into a “true democracy.”

The reform would politicize INE, essentially doing away with the current setup to create a smaller, centralized body with a shoestring budget. Senior leadership would be elected by popular vote, instead of by Congress, and the electoral court would become part of the Supreme Court. The reforms aren’t expected to pass, but the proposals could damage trust.

“Thirty years ago it was common to analyze democracies by groups: young democracies, like those in Latin America vs. established democracies” like the U.S., says Dr. Córdova. “Today, the problems faced by democracies are global – like fake news, disinformation, lack of credibility in political parties, the concentration of power in the executive.”

“Building confidence is a slow process, measured in small increments,” he says. “But loss of trust can happen in an instant … and it’s measured in kilometers.”