Redstate

Another Sore Loser

By California Yankee Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Mexico's electoral court unanimously rejected most of the 240 complaints leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador filed challenging last month's presidential election in Mexico.

That wasn't good enough for Obrador. Reuters reports Obrador refuses to accept defeat and said the top electoral court had shamed Mexico by upholding the July 2 election result.

The initial results showed the National Action Party's conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, won the election by 0.58 of a percent or 244,000 votes out of 41 million ballots. The Court's action did not change that initial outcome.

The Associated Press reports a partial recount won't erase Calderon's lead, but the judges held off declaring a winner. The court also put off until next week a decision on the request by Obrador to annul the election entirely, but the New York Times reported that the court's action virtually assured Calderón of being named president:

The judges said in open court today that the tribunal had ordered the votes from scores of polling places annulled for irregularities found during a partial recount, but that the final result would not change. They also made it clear they found no evidence of fraud.

“Based on all the annulments that were deemed necessary, all the parties lost a considerable number of votes, but that did not affect the result,” Magistrate José Alejandro Luna Ramos said.

[. . .]

All told, the court annulled 81,010 votes for Mr. Calderón and 76,897 for Mr. López Obrador after recounting ballots in about 9 percent of the precincts to satisfy legal challenges. Crossing out those votes gave the leftist candidate a slight boost of 4,183 votes, far fewer than he needed to catch up, electoral officials said.

According to the Times, Obrador's accusations have become more and more outlandish over the last month, going so far as to claim the court itself had been bribed:

On Sunday, Mr. López Obrador told a large crowd of supporters that any ruling that put Mr. Calderón in office without recounting all ballots “would be an abuse of the people’s rights, a rupture of the constitutional order and a coup d’état.”

[. . .]

Mr. López Obrador has called for a national assembly to be held in the city’s main square, the Plaza de la Constitución, on Sept. 16 to decide the future of his campaign of civil disobedience to “save democracy” and “purify public life.” He has suggested the assembly could name him president of an alternative government.

In an earlier article the Associated Press covered the leftist sore-loser plans to form a parallel government if he is not declared the winner. Obrador told supporters that they should decide whether to name a president or leader of a peaceful, civil resistance movement:

"What is chosen during the convention will have representation and that representation can be a legitimate president of the republic or, if the convention chooses, a head of a resistance government or the coordinator of peaceful civil resistance," he said.

The former mayor says his supporters will continue to block streets and cripple traffic in Mexico City for years if the Federal Electoral Tribunal doesn't grant his demand for a full recount.

Why can't leftist losers just accept it when they loose, instead of doing their best to throw the country they want to lead into chaos? And when civil unrest in Mexico slows that nation's economy, what is the United States to do as more illegal aliens cross the border looking for better opportunity and stability?