The election of the four new directors of the National Electoral Institute (INE) who must take office as of April 3 was concentrated in chance. The Political Coordination Board (Jucopo) of the Chamber of Deputies did not reach a consensus and determined that the appointments would not derive from a political agreement, but from the insaculation in a raffle.
Until the closing of this edition, the legislators were preparing to develop this method to designate the three electoral advisers and the president of the institute.
After several days in which the benches held meetings outside the premises, trying to establish an agreement or negotiation to choose four names from the list of 20 profiles provided by the Technical Evaluation Committee, this was not achieved.
At 10:00 p.m. this Thursday, the coordinators of Morena, PAN, PRI, PT, PVEM, Movimiento Ciudadano and PRD, as well as the president of the Board of Directors, Santiago Creel Miranda, locked themselves up to try to build the agreement indicated in the call that this legislative body endorsed weeks ago.
However, after little more than an hour, it was announced that all the benches, except that of Movimiento Ciudadano, determined that the decision would depend on a lottery.
According to the agreement announced by the Board of Directors at 11:45 a.m. yesterday, this process would begin at 12:30 a.m. this Friday, January 31, to comply with what was scheduled in the call.
The agreement stated that a lottery would be held among the secretaries of the Board of Directors to act as the first and second tellers, and a third as announcer of the result of the insaculation in each of the four quintets issued by the Technical Committee for the vacancies. To ensure that all the deputy secretaries participated, a lottery was established to choose the scrutineers in each quintet.
It was determined that, during the process, only the desk secretaries would remain in the area where the platform is located, where electronic devices could not be used.
Once the inputs were integrated with the names of the applicants integrated into closed and sealed envelopes inside an urn, it was determined to rotate it 10 times. Once this has been done, the secretary, with her eyes fixed on the plenary session, would insert her hand into the ballot box and randomly take one of the envelopes and hand it over to the advertiser and the process would be repeated for each quintet.
It was specified that, in the event that the person in charge of extracting the envelope did not look at the plenary session, the process should be repeated.
At the end of the insaculation, the presidency of the Board would issue the declaration of the election of the councilors, which must be notified to the INE, the Senate, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) and the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF).
While the parliamentary coordinators established the rules to carry out this process, the plenary session of the Lower House became involved in a broad confrontation, led by the parliamentary groups of the PAN and Morena and their allies.
The tragedy that claimed the lives of 39 migrants in Ciudad Juárez and the fire at the ABC nursery were the vehicles that the groups used to attack each other.