The projects that were budgeted as if they did not represent any expense are precisely three closely linked to voting rights, which is the fundamental activity of the INE: the Federal Electoral Process, two Local Electoral Processes and one for the prevention and attention of harassment and sexual or workplace harassment.
Furthermore, only the payment for the first semester of the year was budgeted for INE workers who are on a fee basis, and who on average have 7.4 years of seniority, but some have been serving the Institute for up to 26 years.
In the case of the preliminary budget for the popular consultation (which will no longer be needed), the INE had also agreed, with the majority vote, not to include expenses for early voting, preventive pressure voting, voting from abroad and labor rights of temporary workers of the Institute.
“Planning without allocated resources turns objectives into simple statements that are impossible to materialize and lack institutional effectiveness. In short, planning without money is planning for non-compliance,” Faz Mora had warned at the time.
But with a divided vote, the INE endorsed that strategy. The president of the Budget Commission, Norma Irene de la Cruz, boasted in August that a rational budget and even savings were possible.
In the plenary session of the General Council of the INE, the request for additional spending for the Technical Unit for Transparency and Protection of Personal Data, headed by José Luis Arévalo Romo, was also discussed, who a few months ago decided to send 20 people from his staff to the Internal Control Body of the INE, supposedly for the sake of efficiency.
But now through the budget of the institutional project portfolio, that Unit requested 39 million pesos more than in 2025, so austerity and efficiency would not have been real.
“And this budget is 90% allocated to the hiring of personnel, so not only does it recover the amount required to operate in 2025 that was already allocated, but also from what we can see it seems that the corresponding allocation is facilitated, even tripled,” explained counselor Rita Bell.
“I requested clarification and that it be justified about the need to hire these positions, that we were very clear about how many people, with what salaries and what they were going to do specifically, but this request was not met in a concrete way. They sent me a card, but it seems to me that it does not comply and for me it still does not justify what we require,” he said.
Counselor Arturo Castillo even revealed that tasks that take days, the Transparency Unit converts into months and it is the counselors who in the end correct and do the work, which is why it is necessary to evaluate the efficiency of the staff.
Counselor Claudia Zavala added: “the Transparency Unit, which although it has a new attribution or new attributions due to the reform, it is not fully justified how it needs an additional 70% of personnel, when before what it pointed out is that transferring positions to the OIC and the Technical Unit for Electoral Litigation allowed it to function with what it had.”
