Voting passed off briskly and with remarkable calm in Mexico City yesterday as queues of up to 60 people formed outside several polling booths in the Benito Juarez district in the south of the city.
Inside each voting booth an army of logistical workers, observers and party representatives checked arriving voters against a list which included the photo of every eligible voter, a foolproof mechanism to ensure transparency on the day. Most voters were tight-lipped about their preferences, resisting efforts to cajole a comment on the process.
An estimated 10 million new voters were entitled to cast a vote for the presidency, a decisive margin in a closely contested race, with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, Mr Francisco Labastida, enjoying a slim lead over Mr Vicente Fox according to last-minute polls.
Political campaigning was banned for the past 72 hours, along with the sale of alcohol, while the centre-right National Action Party (PAN) offered a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the capture of mapaches (an animal that steals corn in the countryside), the name given to the PRI's vote-stuffers who have given the party a helping hand in every past election.
The first unofficial reports of vote manipulation appeared at mid-day yesterday when PAN activists discovered a PRI campaign centre in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, where PRI activists had allegedly assembled a group of voters indebted to the party. They gave one voter an invalid voting paper which had to be swapped for a blank paper at the nearby polling booth. The voter then pretended to vote, but in fact took the blank paper back to the party campaign centre. It was marked for the PRI and deposited by the next voter, who then brought his blank paper back to the centre. The first vote was wasted, but the scam ensured that all the rest of the group honoured their promise to vote for the PRI. The existence of these "parallel vote centres" has been denounced throughout the country, their potential vote value calculated at three million.
While all political campaigning was banned, Mexico's leading daily Reforma revealed details of a taped telephone conversation in which a ruling party governor promised a parliamentary candidate thousands of dollars in state funds for his election campaign. Five PAN activists were subsequently arrested for distributing copies of the article, in violation of the campaign ban. Despite incidents, the former US president, Mr Jimmy Carter, described the election preparations as "perfect", a ringing endorsement from the most prestigious observer mission in Latin America. But the Carter Centre was looking into a claim that an EU observer received death threats after finding a stash of fraudulent ballot papers in favour of the PRI. The PAN said Mr Rocco Buttiglione, president of Italy's Christian Democrats, received the threats after finding the stash in Campeche state.
The pro-government Televisa said 59 complaints had been formally filed by mid-afternoon.
Swarms of bees descended on voting stations in the state of Mexico, leaving dozens of voters injured.