Electric Monkey Pants

Greg Palast is hinting that the presidential election of the successor to Vicente Fox is being stolen as we speak:

We’ve said again and again: exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can’t tell pollsters whether their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science – and Calderón’s ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.

Calderón’s election is openly supported by the Bush administration.

On the ground in Mexico city, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation’s electoral commission. We are not surprised.

This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico’s voter files under a secret “counter-terrorism” contract with the database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia.

Mexico has a long history of corrupt elections. The PRI has stolen more elections than George Bush could dream of stealing. Let’s hope things turn out to be fair… but I doubt that will be the case. Greg Palast has more on his blog.

Personally, the ChoicePoint involvement sounds suspicious to me, but it’s notoriously hard to determine if elections are fair or not. I’d be interested to hear what the international observers (if they were let in) say about the election.