Mexico’s electoral authorities said on Wednesday that votes from some 54 percent of the polling stations countrywide were being recounted.
The recount decision was made in response to the claims of fraud and demands for recounts in Sunday’s presidential race.
The leftist Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday he had filed requests for vote recount to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) as his campaign team has found “some sorts of inconsistencies” in 113,855 polling stations out of the almost 143,000 installed on Sunday.
Obrador demanded a recount of every vote cast, but the IFE said that just more than half of the polling booths met the necessary conditions to trigger a recount process.
According to the country’s election law, a recount can only be requested at a polling station where the vote gap is less than 1 percentage point between the top two candidates, or for other “inconsistencies” that may appear during the vote counting.
Despite Obrador’s strong fraud accusations, IFE Executive Secretary Edmund James still believed that the election is the most open and transparent in the nation’s electoral history.
He also said that the recount is expected to be completed on Thursday.
According to the IFE, the recount outcome would not significantly change the preliminary results, which indicated that Enrique Pena Nieto, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a former governor of Mexico State, won the race with a comfortable margin of 6 percentage points over his arch rival Obrador.