INE

The Commission on Prerogatives and Political Parties of the National Electoral Institute (INE) unanimously approved the draft agreements on the validity of the election of deputies and senators based on the principle of proportional representation, which assign the political parties the seats that correspond to them and complete the distribution that they will have in the Congress of the Union.

These two projects will still have to be approved next Friday by the General Council of the institute, which resolved that the national leader of Movimiento Ciudadano, Dante Delgado, will not have a plurinominal seat due to parity issues, and that Amalia García was assigned in his place, since her party had the lowest representation of women in the Senate.

After a series of arguments from the opposition regarding the fact that the distribution of pluri-seat deputies and senators involves fraud against the law, vote transfer and over-representation of Morena and its allies, electoral counselor Uuc Kib Espadas, president of this commission, said that it is very clear that the allocation must be by political party and although he is not in favor of over-representation, “I am obliged to respect the republican order and the prevalence of the constitutional order. We are obliged to respect the literal meaning of the constitutional text.”

The president of this commission was the only one of the five councilors that make up the commission (Uuc Kib Espadas, Norma de la Cruz, Dania Ravel, Carla Humphrey and Arturo Castillo) to issue a statement on the assignment of plurinominal legislators and questioned whether it is legitimate for one or several parties to be overrepresented as a result of an election and that if they were allied they have overrepresentation above eight percent.

His response to this reflection summarized that the word ‘party’ is not synonymous with ‘coalition’ and therefore he does not agree with the literal meaning of the constitutional order, but “I do not feel empowered to oppose it and I am obliged to subordinate myself to it.”

At the beginning of the session of this commission, the technical secretary of the commission and head of the executive direction of Prerogatives and Political Parties of the INE, Yessica Alarcón Góngora, made a summary of the mechanisms used for the elaboration of the preliminary projects on the allocation of pluris, indicating that from May 31 to August 20 they received 20 letters from citizens who expressed their disagreements about the allocation of pluris and the possible overrepresentation, and another equal number in the first days of August.

However, he pointed out that this department presents a broad and extensive response to these complaints based on legal arguments established in the Constitution and in the electoral laws, as well as on two theses, six jurisprudences and four criteria of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Federation (TEPJF), which guided the assignment that was voted on today in this commission and that must be discussed next Friday in the General Council.

Based on these criteria and norms, the draft bills circulated tonight establish that in the deputies Morena won 161 of the 300 electoral districts plus 75 plurinominal, which gives a bench of 236; the Green Party would have a total of 77 (57 of majority and 20 of proportional representation) and 51 of the Labor Party (38 and 13, respectively), to make a block of 364 members.

Meanwhile, Movimiento Ciudadano would be left with a group of 27 deputies (one won at the polls and 26 by proportional representation).

The PAN would have 72 (32 by relative majority and 40 by plurinominal); the PRI, 35 (nine by relative majority and 26 by pluris), while the PRD would only have one, for the district it won at the polls. The party of the sun azteca does not qualify for the pluri distribution because it will lose its registration, having not reached 3 percent of the national vote. The opposition PRI-PAN-PRD bench would have 108 seats.

Additionally, an independent deputy will enter.

The draft bill on the allocation of senate seats establishes 60 seats for Morena; 22 for the PAN; 16 for the PRI, 14 for the PVEM, nine for the PT, five for MC and two for the PRD. Thus, the Morena and allies bloc would total 83.

At the last minute, prior to the session of this commission, Yessica Alarcón detailed that they received a request from Morena for a deputy of relative majority who won and in practice is a leader of the PT in Sonora, to be registered as a Morena candidate, which was not discussed in this session, because it was not on the agenda, but it will be added as an addition to the session on Friday.

PAN representative, Álvaro Marvaez, insisted in his interventions that the allocation as it appears in the project would be a violation and fraud of the law, with respect to what the people voted on June 2, under the argument that more pluris were assigned to Morena’s allies.

In response to the opposition’s accusations, Sergio Gutiérrez, Morena’s representative at the INE, asserted that their argument “is fictitious and fanciful,” because on June 2, the people gave them the confidence to have the qualified majority to proceed with Plan C. “Understand and accept the result.”