Mexican legislation includes a series of provisions regarding electoral polls. It can be said that they are what common sense indicates. Apparently the necessary ones. At least they were considered that way for almost three decades. Now, however, it seems that they are already insufficient.
In fact, the suspicion is becoming more widespread, increasing day by day, that the results disseminated from such polls on voter preferences have evolved in the following way:
From simple information, in principle innocuous, about the voters’ voting intention, it became an unfair instrument of political propaganda in campaigns, finally leading to a mechanism of electoral fraud. If the latter is fully confirmed, something will have to be done about it as soon as the current electoral process concludes. I hope it is not too late.
Article 213 of the General Law of Electoral Institutions and Procedures (LGIPE) establishes four main provisions regarding electoral surveys. According to the first, it is established that it is the responsibility of the General Council of the INE to “issue the rules, guidelines and criteria that individuals or legal entities must adopt to carry out surveys or opinion polls within the framework of federal and local electoral processes.”
The following two provisions establish that those who disseminate survey results must present to the INE “a report on the resources applied in their implementation”, one, and the other: that in the case of local elections “the methodology, costs, responsible persons and results of the surveys or polls will be disseminated on their website” by the respective state agencies.
And finally, that “during the three days prior to the election and until the closing time of the polls, it is strictly prohibited to publish, disseminate or make known by any means of communication, the results of surveys or opinion polls, which “Its purpose is to make electoral preferences known.”
Regarding this last provision, the General Law on Electoral Crimes establishes a fine and imprisonment of up to three years for anyone who violates it (article 7, section XV).
And they are practically all the legal provisions regarding electoral polls, to which must be added those of a regulatory nature included in articles 132 to 142 of the Election Regulations issued by the INE.
In recent years, the most notable thing in our country in terms of electoral surveys has been the enormous bands of difference that are observed between the percentages of voting by parties, according to the samples of a good number of polling houses (the same ones that, by the way, have proliferated) and the actual voting by party on election day. Differences that later no one bothers to explain, in a monumental demonstration of absolute lack of professional ethics.
Regarding such enormous differences, it makes no sense to tire the reader here with numerical examples, of which there are many, of what happened in the matter at hand in the 2021 federal elections and in state elections from 2019 to 2023.
The most recent and graphic example of the above is the election of the State of Mexico last year. A majority of pollsters (except for two who were more accurate) arrived on the eve of the elections attributing to Morena and its allies an average advantage of around 25 points. And finally it turned out to be 8 percent. But nothing happened, except that they are practically the same ones that now attribute to the official presidential candidate an advantage of up to 35 and 40 points over the opposition candidate.
The vast majority of polls today are a (crude, manipulative, vulgar) form of electoral propaganda. Hence, Morena’s representatives before the INE, in the parliamentary tribunes, in the media and on social networks, their supreme campaign argument consists of mentioning again, again and many times, the alleged large difference in their favor that they they give the surveys (except for two or three that they do not mention).
The manipulation in this matter has already reached such extremes that it will be necessary to truly analyze this issue in depth. And if this is the case, prior rigorous studies and the caveats that may well arise (such as the 11M in Spain in 2004), establish parameters based on which they are considered a form of electoral fraud, with all its consequences. Enough manipulation and deception!
