Mexico’s Galvez to Ask Electoral Body to Recount 80% Votes

(Bloomberg) -- Mexican opposition leader Xochitl Galvez said she will ask the electoral authority to recount 80% of the votes from Sunday’s election, in which she lost the presidency to ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum.

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Galvez said the opposition has found differences in the election results in some voting centers compared to the preliminary results published by the National Electoral Institute, known as INE.

“There are 80% of the ballot boxes where I will request a vote-by-vote review,” she said in a video posted on X late Tuesday.

Galvez also said she instructed her legal team to initiate legal actions against President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for “intervening” in the election and for the use of public funds for the ruling Morena party’s campaign. She also called against the intervention of organized crime in the process.

“We have started with the resistance to protect our democracy, our constitution and our freedom,” she said.

Sheinbaum won Sunday’s election to Galvez by a margin of at least 31 percentage points with 95% of votes counted, according to the electoral authority. Final results are to be expected in the coming days, with the official count starting early Wednesday.

Mario Delgado, the president of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, responded in a post on X that the election was a clear rejection of the opposition’s campaign, adding that the votes had been cast freely.

“The people’s mandate was clear: With a difference of two to one, our candidate Claudia Sheinbaum obtained more than 35 million votes, 15 million votes more than the second-place person. No president in the history of Mexico has received so many votes,” he said in a video.

The electoral authority already plans to recount votes in more than 60% of the polling stations installed for the presidential election, El Economista reported.

--With assistance from Maya Averbuch.

(Updates with defense from Morena’s party president in seventh paragraph.)

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