Mexican general election, 2000

Mexican general election, 2000

July 2, 2000
Turnout	63.97%
Nominee Vicente Fox Francisco Labastida Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Party PAN PRI PRD Alliance Alliance for Change – Alliance for Mexico Home state Guanajuato Sinaloa Mexico City Popular vote 15,989,636 13,579,718 6,256,780 Percentage 42.5% 36.1% 16.6%
States won by the presidential candidates (blue for Fox, green for Labastida and yellow for Cárdenas)
President before election Ernesto Zedillo PRI Elected President Vicente Fox PAN

General elections were held in Mexico on Sunday, July 2, 2000.

Voters went to the polls to elect:

• A new President of the Republic to serve a six-year term, replacing then Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (ineligible for re-election under the 1917 Constitution), the election system is plurality voting.
• 500 members (300 by the first-past-the-post system and 200 by proportional representation) to serve for a three-year term in the Chamber of Deputies.
• 128 members (three per state by first-past-the-post and 32 by proportional representation from national party lists) to serve six-year terms in the Senate. In each state, two first-past-the-post seats are allocated to the party with the largest share of the vote, and the remaining seat is given to the first runner-up.

The presidential elections were won by Vicente Fox of the Alliance for Change, who received 43.4% of the vote,^[1] the first time the opposition had won an election since the Mexican Revolution. In the Congressional elections the Alliance for Change emerged as the largest faction in the Chamber of Deputies with 224 of the 500 seats, whilst the Institutional Revolutionary Party remained the largest faction in the Senate with 60 of the 128 seats in the Senate.^[2] Voter turnout was between 63 and 64% in the elections.^[3]

This historically significant election made Fox the first president elected from an opposition party since Francisco I. Madero in 1910, and the first one in 71 years to defeat, with 42 percent of the vote, the then-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Mexico
This article is part of a series on the politics and government of Mexico
Constitution Law Constitution (history) Human rights LGBT rights Law Abortion Labor Nationality Capital punishment Life imprisonment Gun politics
Executive President (list) Enrique Peña Nieto Federal government Cabinet
Legislative Congress (current) Senate Chamber of Deputies Federal electoral districts
Judiciary Supreme Court of Justice Federal Electoral Tribunal
Administrative divisions States Governors Municipalities
Elections Recent major elections General: 2006 2012 2018 Legislative: 2003 2009 2015 Gubernatorial: 2010 Federal Electoral Institute
Political parties Institutional Revolutionary National Action Democratic Revolution Labor Party National Regeneration Ecologist Green Citizens' Movement New Alliance
Foreign relations
Other countries Atlas

Presidential election

Some isolated incidents of irregularities and problems were reported. For example, one irregularity in the southern state of Campeche involved the European Union electoral observer Rocco Buttiglione and could have created problems for President Ernesto Zedillo had the PRI candidate won. Overall, however, electoral observers identified little evidence that those incidents were centrally coordinated (as opposed to led by local PRI officials), and critics concluded that those irregularities which did occur did not materially alter the outcome of the presidential vote, which had been more definitive than expected.

Civic organizations fielded more than 80,000 trained electoral observers, foreign observers were invited to witness the process, and numerous "quick count" operations and exit polls (not all of them independent) validated the official vote tabulation. The largest exit poll was organized by the U.S. firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, financed by a hitherto obscure outfit in Dallas called Democracy Watch. It emerged later that Democracy Watch had effectively been created by Vicente Fox campaign insiders to help prevent the success of any expected election fraud.

Numerous electoral reforms implemented since 1989 aided in the opening of the Mexican political system, and since then opposition parties have made historic gains in elections at all levels. The chief electoral concerns shifted from outright fraud to campaign fairness issues and, between 1995 and 1996, the political parties negotiated constitutional amendments to address these issues. The legislation implemented included major points of consensus that had been worked out with the opposition parties. Under the new laws, public financing predominated over private contributions to political parties, procedures for auditing parties were tightened, and the authority and independence of the electoral institutions were strengthened. The court system was also given greatly expanded authority to hear civil rights cases on electoral matters brought by individuals or groups. In short, the extensive reform efforts of the 1990s "leveled the playing field" for the parties.

Congress of the Union

References