Nor do I agree, however, with the electoral reform known as “Plan B.” I believe that it is a deeply harmful reform, that it destroys an institution that took a long time to build, that disdains the experience and lessons learned over several decades in favor of a very hostile austerity not against a “privileged elite” but, rather, against a highly specialized, efficient and exemplary bureaucracy. It is a reform, above all, that does not solve any of the complex problems that the electoral system has (for example, the diversion of resources and illicit money in campaigns, violence against candidates, the political use of social programs) and which instead creates new problems in something as basic as the ability to organize fair, free and fair elections. It is a maneuver favorable to the interests of the coalition in power, but it is a reform that endangers Mexican democracy.
Objecting to the first (that “the INE does not touch” is a bad slogan) to ignore or dismiss the second (that the electoral reform implies an evident authoritarian regression) is not only a logical fallacy, it is an act of intellectual dishonesty. The defects that the approach of those who are against the reform may have are not virtues for the arguments of those who are in favor. Just because your counterpart is wrong doesn’t mean you’re right. And less when you insist on pointing out that mistake not so much to correct it as to disqualify whoever fell into it and, thus, divert the debate. That those who are trying to defend democracy make mistakes does not mean that defending democracy is wrong.
Of course, the INE, like any other public institution in a republican regime, can be “touched”; the question is how and for what, at what cost and with what consequences. That is the core of the discussion that the ruling party, so well trained in the bad arts of post-truth, has stubbornly evaded both in the sphere of public opinion and in the parliamentary forum.
