But it is also true that there is an absent citizenry in two senses: 1) people who vote in a territory other than the one where they live, with natural risks due to the lack of accurate, updated and sufficient information, and 2) a broad disinterest in exercise the vote from outside Mexico.
It has caused a lot of commotion when the National Electoral Institute (INE) announced that voting abroad will be excluded from the judicial election, that is, that those who reside outside the country will not be able to participate in the renewal of judges, magistrates. , ministers in next year’s election (second extraordinary session of the General Council on December 13).
Seven councilors ruled out this modality compared to three who spoke in favor of it. Among those who rejected it, Uuc-kib Espadas argued: “it seems to me that claiming that Mexicans who are not going to be subject to the jurisdiction of certain judges elect them is a claim that is not supported by the right to vote guaranteed by the Constitution.” . A basic principle of democracy is that people can vote for those who exercise authority over them, and in this case it would be a clear contradiction that people who cannot be judged by the people who are going to be elected, must decide who are the people who will judge. to other people.”
For counselor Dania Paola Ravel, the problem of not considering the modality has to do with a material and technical impossibility: “we are really making this extraordinary choice against the current. One of the issues we have to face is the limited time we have to carry out this election (…) although it is the usual time in which we organize an ordinary election, but this election is different, very different from the ones we have organized”.
One of the councilors who defended voting abroad in the 2025 judicial election was Carla Astrid Humphrey. “It seems to me that it is a historic struggle that the migrant community has waged. “I don’t see compelling reasons to exclude them,” he said at the beginning of his participation. Later he mentioned the classic argument of the large Mexican community abroad.
It is true, “according to the IME, there are more than 12 million first generation Mexicans, but if we talk about second and third generations, we reach almost 36, 37 million. These 12 million to which I refer is a larger electoral roll than countries like Portugal, Bulgaria, only smaller than, for example, the roll of the State of Mexico in our country,” as Humphrey cited.
However, the figures show an enormous lack of interest on the part of Mexicans residing abroad in voting, that is the reality. These are data that the counselor herself mentioned in her speech: in 2006, 32,621 people voted, now 184,326 votes have been received. Isn’t it an insignificant amount compared to the large potential registry that is being talked about, made up of more than 12 million people?
