Starting Tuesday, debate on electoral reform

Georgina Saldierna and Enrique Mendez

Newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, July 21, 2022, p. 8

With the vote of Morena and her allies, the Political Coordination Board of the Chamber of Deputies agreed to publicly discuss – starting Tuesday and for a month – the electoral reform initiatives, but each of the two blocks into which the legislative chamber will make its own forums.

Morena confirmed its call for 400 assemblies, of which 300 will be held in the 300 electoral districts and 100 in the largest municipalities in the country; meanwhile, Goes for Mexico (PRI, PAN and PRD) announced that it will organize its own debate, to which it will invite electoral councilors and magistrates to receive proposals, and that It’s not just a political discussion..

The intention of the majority bench is that the official parliament – whose organization will cost 20 million pesos – concludes on August 25, and that the technical secretariat of the board and the liaisons of the benches present a report between the 26 of that month and the first of September.

Morena intends that the Electoral Reform and Constitutional Points commissions deliver a draft opinion at the beginning of the ordinary period of sessions, even though the PAN, PRI and PRD announced since June a moratorium against the presidential initiative of electoral reform and the pending one, to annex the National Guard to the Army.

While Morena, PT and PVEM voted in favor of an open parliament, the opposition did so by abstaining. At the conclusion of yesterday’s meeting of the board, the coordinator of the icing caucus, Ignacio Mier, explained that the commissions have 49 reform initiatives in electoral matters, including those delivered since the last legislature and that of the President.

One day after the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, stated that if the electoral authorities sanction him, the legislators will disappear from the National Electoral Institute (INE), Mier considered that the reform also seeks to specify the powers of the councilors and the Court Electoral so that beyond their powers, do not violate the political rights of Mexicans, including officials.

He justified that, as long as they do not use public resources to promote themselves electorally, have the right to express their aspirationsbut when he was reminded that, before the referendum to revoke the presidential mandate, the head of the Interior traveled on a National Guard plane, Mier stated that it was not on purpose to campaign.