Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

W.W. Kato.org.

Since the Mexican presidential elections on July 2nd, conservative Felipe Caleron's victory

over leftist candidate Lopez-Obrador has been heavily protested.

The streets of Mexico City have been blocked by Lopez-Obrador's supporters for over a month,

and they are calling for a full recount of the election results.

Cato adjunct scholar Roberto Salinas-Léon discusses the situation in today's podcast.

Is there any evidence that the recent Mexican elections were fraudulent?

No, there really is not any solid evidence that the elections held on July 2nd were fraudulent.

The Mexican electoral system has progressed enormously in view of the culture of fraud that

used to prevail beforehand in elections basically all throughout most of the

20th century. Great efforts were done to put all kinds of checks and

balances including

representation of all parties in the different sites where

people can go vote in addition to very strict controls in the way that the votes are counted.

There is also a tribunal with highly distinguished judges that are able to oversee and to

verify the validity of the elections.

The allegations of fraud right now

have wavered between whether this is an extremely

sophisticated cybernetic fraud

or this is a fraud equivalent to the way that electoral fraud used to

...