Of the 13,205 million pesos requested by the INE exclusively for the election of judges, magistrates and ministers, the Chamber of Deputies was not authorized even one labeled peso to the electoral body.
On the contrary, of the total amount requested (40,475 million pesos), which included resources for that election, its base budget, institutional portfolio of projects, financing of political parties and an eventual Popular Consultation, only 27,000 million pesos were authorized in the Expenditure Budget 2025.
According to calculations by electoral advisors, the INE will only have around 4,349 million pesos for the election, so it will have to make adjustments to the rest of its items – without touching the resources of the parties – to carry out the judicial election.
Through adjustments and readjustments to its budget, the final purse for the judicial election could be 6,132 million pesos, according to the organization’s publicly aired estimates.
The 2025 election will be the largest the country has ever had – contrary to what the Executive and Morena maintain – since 881 (federal) judicial positions will be elected. In the last federal electoral process there were 629 federal positions, the rest were local.
Furthermore, in June there were 2,304 applications and now more than 5,000 are expected.
For the election of judges, magistrates and ministers, it had been planned to install more than 172 thousand polling stations, but that will not be possible and now 80,000 “voting centers” are being considered, as admitted by the president of the INE, Guadalupe Taddei.
“The first adjustment will be in the structure of the election,” he commented.
For the installation of 172,000 polling stations, 50,000 Electoral Assistant Trainers (CAES) were planned, and now only 30,000 are estimated, in addition to Electoral Supervisors (SE).
The CAES will be responsible for visiting more than 13 million Mexicans born in February and May, according to the draw held last week by the INE, to invite them to participate.
Furthermore, their salaries cannot be increased and they will have an excessive workload, higher than that of the last electoral process, reported counselor Dania Ravel last week, in a General Council session, on December 20.
For the 2024 Federal Electoral Process, 7,123 electoral supervisors and 42,657 CAE were hired, salaries fluctuated between 15,785 pesos and 9,500 pesos and, Ravel recalled, there were staff losses because they were not such high salaries.
According to counselor Norma de la Cruz, it is even being analyzed that, instead of boxes with 750 ballots, there may be “voting centers” with between 1,500 and 3,000 ballots.
“We have to review our model. Instead of having your box one block away, it will be three or five blocks away,” the counselor said at a press conference last week.
They will look for savings even on bills
Because the resources requested by the INE were not authorized, it agreed – in an unprecedented manner – not to carry out the national sample verification surveys to review the electoral roll prior to an election.
This control is established to verify and, where appropriate, stop cases of irregular issuance of credentials to vote with photography, or that there are already deceased people on the registry.
Another area in which savings are sought will be in the receipts.
“Perhaps no longer on security paper, but with security measures. Maybe no longer on letter paper, letter size, but half a letter,” counselor Carla Humphrey assessed in the aforementioned session.
The ballots, however, are part of the security measures that have been established in the Mexican elections to avoid falsifications. These are: watermark with the INE logo, visible optical fibers, hidden optical fibers, microprinting, inverted printing, latent image and invisible printing, padlocks that are under review.
According to the councilors, all the expenses of the different executive areas, of all the responsible units of the INE, will continue to be reviewed to see where it is possible to reduce some expenses and allocate them to the judicial elections.
However, there are other decisions already made that will allow forced savings.
Contrary to what has happened for decades, Mexicans who live outside the country will not be able to participate (vote abroad), since the judicial reform did not provide mechanisms to make it possible. And the current legal framework requires audits to be carried out on electronic voting systems before making them applicable, so they cannot be applied in the 2025 election.
Furthermore, also due to savings, there will be no election within penitentiary centers, so inmates with or without a sentence will not be able to pay for it either.
The General Council of the INE approved the implementation of early voting only for the election of the ministers and magistrates of the Judicial Disciplinary Court, as well as the Superior Chamber of the Electoral Court of the Judicial Branch of the Federation, which are the only ones whose scope election is throughout the national territory.
The ballots will also be different, so people who opt for this type of voting will have more time to analyze them, identify the candidate of their choice and mark or write their choice in the corresponding space.
The purpose of early voting is to guarantee the exercise of political rights in compliance with various international conventions that promote equality and non-discrimination.
