Mexico City.- Mexico woke up today in anticipation of the referendum that will decide whether Andrés Manuel López Obrador will remain President of the Republic.
The referendum on the revocation of the President’s mandate, which he presented and approved by the Congress of the Republic, started early and properly.
Over the course of a long day, ending at 6 a.m. when the 57,000 ballot boxes distributed across the country close, Mexicans eligible to vote will answer a single question unsuccessfully approved and corrected by the electoral tribunal. the protests of the ruling Morena party for its change.
The question submitted for consultation and appearing on the ballot papers reads: “Do you agree that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of the United Mexican States, be relieved of his mandate for lack of confidence or that he remain President of the Republic? until the end of his term?
Citizens have only two options to react: 1) That the mandate be revoked due to a loss of confidence. 2) That he remains President of the Republic. The first results of the so-called quick count are to be known this evening, and that will point the way.
But for that result to be binding on the president, positive or negative, they must field the equivalent of 40 percent of the current electoral roll, meaning they must cast their ballot in front of just over 37 million people.
Conditions are not exactly conducive, Morena lawmakers warned, because although INE has printed 94.5 million ballot papers, each with a set of security measures to make them tamper-proof, it’s just two million square kilometers of the country’s 57,000 ballot boxes.
This imbalance – which the INE attributed to a lack of budget to set up more polling stations – has the ruling party fearing that an important part of the electorate will not be able to reach the polling stations, and condemned it as a maneuver by the INE and the opposition parties for rejecting the request.
But special ballot boxes are also installed so that those who are outside their jurisdiction can do so anywhere, but in this case it is also insufficient, since hardly 300 and two thousand ballot papers are issued for these cases.
In any case, López Obrador has said several times in his morning press conferences that if the number of voters proposed by the INE for the mandatory exercise is not reached and he loses lives, he will still withdraw and leave the election, but that is in the approved revocation law not regulated.
If that were to happen hypothetically, the Constitution points out that in the permanent vacancy of the executive branch in a given period, the President of Congress will convene the legislature with a maximum of 30 days’ notice to appoint who will complete the presidential administration by September 30, 2024.
At this point, the appointment would fall to MP Sergio Gutiérrez Luna, a member of the ruling Morena party and president of the board of directors of the Chamber of Deputies, but he will not be able to be recalled or appointed without the secretaries of state and the approval of the senators.
The few polls conducted and published give López Obrador 63 percent of the votes for him and only around 30 against. It will be seen tonight whether the opinion research institutes are right.