Enrique Mendez, Georgina Saldierna and Fernando Camacho
Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 24, 2022, p. 4
To avoid a setback in the electoral system, the president of the National Electoral Institute (INE), Lorenzo Córdova, stated yesterday that in a possible reform, the autonomy of the body, its professional service, its national and district structure, as well as the role it has as custodian and administrator of the voter registry. Fairness in the contest must also be maintained.
When participating in the Open Parliament forums for electoral reform organized by the Political Coordination Board of the Chamber of Deputies, Córdova stressed that the INE does not need to be refounded or thoroughly transformed, much less suppressed or disappear in allusion to the proposal of the Executive to modify the structure of the institute.
Although the electoral system is perfectible, he considered that at this time a reform is neither essential nor urgent. You can go to the 2023 and 2024 elections with the existing rules.
Modifications to the legal framework may be pertinent as long as consensus among political forces is maximized; there is a progressive, gradual and evolutionary line of the previous changes, that is, that it goes in the logic of improving what exists today, and that it starts from a clear, true and objective diagnosis of the operation of the electoral system, added the electoral councilor .
Marco Baños, former counselor of the INE, stressed that a reform is required, for example, to adapt the electoral calendars and specify what officials can or cannot do during campaign periods.
Earlier, in a forum organized by the UNAM, Córdova reiterated that the reform proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador not relevant
nor essential, above all because it could mean a setback in some of the achievements that have been made in the matter in the past 40 years.
The official stressed that currently the electoral field does not mean a problematic dimension
for Mexico, so there is no real need to carry out any reform.
If such modification does not occur, nothing is going to happen to us, because there is already an electoral system that works
and although it can be improved, today it already guarantees the political rights of citizens.
Córdova pointed out that it is preferable that the reform proposed by the Executive not be carried out if it does not meet various conditions, including generating broad consensus among the various political forces, which really serves to improve the election system.
In the same forum, Jacqueline Peschard, former citizen counselor of the now defunct Federal Electoral Institute, warned that the presidential reform initiative in this area does not seek to perfect democracy or the representation system, but concentrate on the representation of the majority political forces and leave out the minority
when a better balance between the two should be sought.
