No hanging chads

Americans who move to Mexico sometimes cite their unhappiness with the U.S. political climate.

This usually means they are put out with the Republican Party. A recent survey in the Gringo expat haven of San Miguel de Allende indicated Democrats outnumber Republicans 10-to-one.

This is a textbook case of leaping from the pot into the fire.

Or, it used to be. Okay, it still is to a great degree.

Mexico, for most of the 20th Century, was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. These were a bunch of clever guys who lined their pockets famously for seventy years.

They finally over-reached, miscalculated and lost the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. I have always voted Democratic in the U.S., but in Mexico I am a diehard PAN man. The party is Mexico´s best hope.

This was an easy decision because in the last election, the leftist candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, exhibited an alarming messianic fervor. He is also uncomfortable with democracy, which he favors only if he wins. His followers concur.

Do not make the common error of thinking these two parties somehow resemble the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. They do not.

Mexico has moved from rotten elections to an open system that has been praised at length by international watchdog organizations. Our elections are more straightforward than those in the U.S. We have a totally new system run by an independent agency, the Federal Election Institute.

Every polling station has watchers of the main parties on site. The ballots are big paper sheets on which you mark your X's in private. You fold the ballot and insert it in the ballot boxes which are see-through.

At the end of the day, the ballots are taken out and counted at each polling station with opposing party representatives looking on. The results are posted on a big sign outside each polling station for everyone in the neighborhood to see.

These individual polling station results are then phoned into a national center where they are totaled, again in the presence of party-watchers. It is clean. It is accurate.

We have moved from darkness into light. Unfortunately, attitudes are slow in changing. Much of Mexico, especially the masses of poorly educated, do not believe things have changed.

The Federal Election Institute and clean elections are very recent arrivals here. So close you can touch them. This means those Gringos who want to move south due to U.S. politics now may really be moving to a cleaner political world.

State and local elections, however, are sometimes another matter. Change is coming slowly to our troubled land. But, it has its foot firmly through the door.

(2008 Note: Due to political pressure from the parties that lost the 2006 presidential election, Mexico is playing around with the electoral system, a supremely lousy idea. It worked fine.)