The composition of Congress will be vital during the last three years of the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Until now, its Congress, in which it has a majority and seeks to maintain it in these elections, has been used to implement an erroneous austerity policy that has led Mexico to be one of the countries in the world with the lowest public spending during the pandemic, which it has had devastating consequences for the poorest Mexicans.
In 2018, López Obrador campaigned on the promise of putting the poor first, expanding social spending, and eradicating the privileges and influences of capitalism in government. His administration has made important progress in labor matters and tax collection, but in the face of the coronavirus crisis, it showed its worst face: an inextricable stubbornness due to erroneous economic policies and refusing to follow basic health standards, such as wearing a mask, which could have helped prevent Mexico from becoming the third country in the world with the most deaths from the pandemic. This is unacceptable and the president’s party, Morena, should be electorally punished in some way. The question is how to do it if the alternatives on the other side do not convince us either. It is a dilemma that at the moment does not have an easy solution for many, but what I am clear about is that the option to annul the vote is not the best.
These are the three reasons why I will not annul my vote.
The first is that in the federal Congress, the annulment of the vote will be de facto a vote in favor of Morena. Mexican electoral legislation indicates that the amount of public money that parties receive for their activities is mostly determined by votes. Whoever has more votes, receives more money. However, when annulling the vote or casting a null vote – which is different from annulling, because it implies making a mistake when filling out the ballot, but which in practical terms counts the same as a deliberately annulled vote – they are not counted as votes and therefore do not influence the distribution of the money available. For the calculation of the money they are eliminated, which amplifies the effect of the other votes. For example, in an election where the vote is divided 55-30 percent between two parties, with 15 percent of the population voting, the proportion of the vote considered for the distribution of money would be adjusted to be 65-35 percent. , extracting the null votes as if they had not passed.
Canceling the vote, de facto, implies promoting the decisions of those who did vote for a specific party. And it makes those decisions last beyond the election because they distort the distribution of resources between political parties by favoring those who were already ahead.
I believe that in the Mexico Congress an opposition to Morena from the left is urgently needed who has understood that López Obrador won the presidency because the policies implemented in the last two decades have turned Mexico into a plutocracy disguised as democracy: ours is a a country where at that time the homicide rate doubled, the middle class was reduced and the number of poor people increased, while a handful of billionaires consolidated their fortunes.
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