debates

Mexico City. Advisors from the National Electoral Institute (INE) indicated that there will be no changes in the formats of the two remaining presidential debates, and that they even proposed adjustments to the representatives of the candidates to intersperse the final questions but they did not want to.

When admitting successes and failures in the first meeting, held on Sunday at the electoral body’s facilities, they said that the stopwatch failure occurred because a production person did not change the count in exact time for one of the participants.

They also defended the methodology for selecting citizens’ questions, arguing that it was endorsed by all those involved, so the different comments “are speculations.”

This morning, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed his disagreement that the moderators had made the final selection of the approaches to the contenders and assured that there was a “narrative” against his government, although he also believed that the debate It was carried out “without major problems.”

The councilors who are members of the Temporary Debates Commission said that they will receive a report on the application of the methodology from ITESO’s Signa Lab, in order to guarantee certainty and transparency.

“What does this mean? That they were not chosen by anyone else at random, that they are questions that clearly come from the people who participated in this exercise, who were on social networks sending the 24 thousand questions and that this is very relevant for this exercise, replicability, traceability and transparency,” said Carla Humphrey, president of the Commission in question.

Dania Ravel said that the selection criteria were “quite transparent,” there was even a public debate on the issue and the director of Signa Lab was separated; She recalled that this group made a selection of questions, removing those that contained offensive terms or political bias, as well as duplicate questions, to which criteria of randomness and frequency were applied.

Regarding the format, counselor Claudia Zavala stressed: the formats have a sequence, we must remember that we programmed them that way, so that there would be citizen participation.

“They are approved by the general council, each one has his own list and in this particular modification (answering the last three questions in a thread or interjecting with other candidates) is the rhythm of the debate, it was allowed, it was open to make those variations, it is not wanted by the representatives of the candidates and that is why it remained that way.

“Obviously we will take care of everything technical, of everything we have to do with the production house itself, what has to be modified, these are lessons we have and things that have to be corrected for the next formats. The formats are different; In the second we are also going to incorporate the voices of the citizens.”

He noted that care was also taken to ensure that the people who asked were real. “Those topics were raised by people.”

On the other hand, regarding the presence of four candidates within the “set”, Humprhey said that she noticed the technical difficulties of this and that one candidate complained because she was distracted for that reason.