How Voting Snags Left Many Local Mexicans Unable To Vote In Mexico’s Historic Election

Mexico has a new president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum. The former Mexico City mayor, environmental scientist and leftist politician as well as a mentee of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, handily won a historic election between two female presidential candidates.

But many Mexican citizens in L.A. who’d hoped to participate in the election Sunday, waiting in long lines for hours to vote at the Mexican consulate, were not able to do so.

There were “thousands and thousands of people trying to vote, maybe, for one of the candidates,” said Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Council of Mexican Federations in North America, known as COFEM, a Los Angeles-based group that works with Mexican immigrants. “And they were really, really angry, because they couldn't vote.”

Morales and others have pointed to a host of problems that got in the way for Mexican citizens in L.A. and at other consulates on Sunday.

Morales said to start, this is the first time Mexican citizens living abroad could vote in person; they are already allowed to vote online and by mail. So this time, many flocked to consulates to vote, including many who had not pre-registered. What they encountered were long lines, unfamiliar and insufficient voting machines, and what critics say is an underestimation by Mexican election officials of the demand from Mexicans abroad.

Raul Murillo, a local representative for the conservative Partido Acción Nacional party, or PAN, was at the L.A. Mexican consulate on Sunday as a party representative; PAN candidate Xochitl Galvez lost the election to Sheinbaum.

Murillo said additional ballots were to be made available to those who didn’t pre-register, but he said locally there were far too few provided. He said there were also just nine voting machines at the consulate, creating severe bottlenecks.

“Too few voting booths for a city the size of Los Angeles, too small of a space in the consulate,” Murillo said. “We need a larger space.”

He added that some people lucky enough to get in the door didn’t know how to use the voting machines, adding to the delay. Murillo said he hopes that for the future, the Mexican government will consider renting a large venue and staffing it with volunteers.

“They can’t tell me that … they can’t rent the convention center,” Murillo said.

This, he said, and providing paper ballots for seniors or others unfamiliar with electronic voting machines.

Moreno with COFEM said that out of thousands of people who lined up outside the consulate, many of them not pre-registered, fewer than a thousand people were able to cast ballots.

The local Mexican consulate did not immediately respond to a request for data.