Of 108 questions, moderators of the 1st debate will choose 30

Mexico City. The National Electoral Institute (INE) gave the moderators of the first presidential debate, Denise Maerker and Manuel López San Martín, the 108 citizen questions, of which they will have to select 30 on which this exercise to be carried out next Sunday will be based.

Upon receiving the envelope with the questions selected by the Iteso Signa Lab, the moderators announced that “to give greater certainty” to the process, they decided that each one on their own will study the reagents and it will be “until the last moment” when they define which ones. They are those who will make the candidates for the Presidency, Claudia Sheinbaum (Morena, PT and Pvem), and Xóchitl Gálvez (PRI, PAN, PRD), and the candidate Jorge Álvarez Máynez (MC).

“We will stay with the questions, each one of us on our own will study them and they will be defined until the last moment, that is, neither he (Manuel) nor I will have until the last moment the questions that will be the ones that will be in the debate,” Maerker said.

In the presence of the electoral advisors who are members of the Temporary Debates Commission of the INE, as well as representatives of the presidential candidates and political parties, the moderators thanked “the trust” granted by the institute.

Carla Humphrey, president of the aforementioned commission, expressed that for this first debate “we are very confident that everything will go well, that each of the decisions that have been made have been unanimous and confirmed by the Superior Chamber” of the Court. Electoral of the Judicial Branch of the Federation (TEPJF).

The INE, he highlighted, “is ready for this debate, we are making the final adjustments, we are preparing the forum in the General Council room”, where for the first time an exercise of this type will be carried out.

He recalled that the topics that will be discussed in this first meeting are health, education, combating corruption, transparency, vulnerable groups and violence against women.

For the selection of reagents, from a universe of 24 thousand collected between February 20 and March 21, he said that a methodology was applied “based on criteria of frequency and randomness, also (Signa Lab) made a dictionary with the terms that we from the General Council had indicated were not allowed, such as offenses, questions directed at a candidate, partisan bias.”

From this, 1,117 items were eliminated and then a code was used that identified the duplicate questions, leaving 1,664 questions that were discarded. Subsequently, a statistical formula was applied that yielded a stratified sample composed of 1,701 questions “that faithfully represent the distribution by region and for each of the topics that will be addressed.”