Political Point of View: Ignored Facts | Jorge Alcocer V.

Jorge Alcocer V.

The INE agreement on the appointment of multi-member councils was approved last Friday by 7 votes in favor and 4 against. The fraudulent overrepresentation of Morena and her allies in the Chamber of Deputies was confirmed. The issue will be decided by the TEPJF Supreme Chamber.

The agreement postulates that the literal interpretation of Article 54 of the Constitution and precedents from 2009 to the present must prevail over any other considerations or facts. In this sense, its authors and those who supported it in the INE support the arguments made in several morning conferences by the head of the Interior, as well as the recently elected president.

As I explained earlier in this section, the justification for trying to give Morena and her allies 364 deputies (72.8% of the total) is that Article 54 of the constitution refers to political parties and not to the electoral coalitions formed by them. It is a contradiction to admit that Section I of the said Article 54 applies to both individual parties and to the coalitions formed by them, while denying the need for such an interpretation of Sections IV and V, which set a maximum limit of 300 deputies and an overrepresentation limit of 8 percentage points. They also fail to take into account that Article 56 of the constitution refers to political parties with regard to the senators of the first majority, but since 2000 the IFE has interpreted it as applying to electoral coalitions.

The central argument of the authors of the agreement can be formulated in one sentence: “this is how it was done before, this is how it should be done in the future.” The first is true. Not the second.

This is the central point of the debate, which both the 4T representatives and most of the electoral advisers have avoided. The proponents of the literal application of Sections IV and V of Article 54 do not take into account the structure and order of such provisions. Moreover, they equate the administrative procedure for the distribution of multi-member mandates with the meaning and purpose of the restrictions established in these factions. As a result of this comparison, they come to a conclusion that is unfounded in terms of facts and law: to grant the ruling party 364 deputies out of 500.

By the logic of the agreement approved, it is impossible to apply the constitutional 54 restrictions to Morena and her allies. Let me explain. For Morena to fall under the 300-member limit, she would have to win 300 constituencies herself or, by adding up the victories of the majority in the alliance, her own and multi-member constituencies, 300 or more.

seats. Only in this case, if he postulates what was approved by the seven councilors, will Section IV be applicable. But it turns out that neither of these two hypotheses can be realized, since in 2024 Morena participated in 260 constituencies allied with the PVEM and PT, to which, by agreement, it transferred 87 majoritarian deputies, which it restores by multi-member distribution. . This is part of the planned fraud.

It is not true that the 2008 COFIPE reform eliminated the application of Sections IV and V of Article 54 to electoral coalitions which, until 2006, had put forward common lists of multi-member candidates and which therefore had to be considered as a single party for the purposes of allocating seats and seats in accordance with this principle (multi-member). By prohibiting the transfer of votes between parties in 2008 and by requiring each party to appear on the ballot paper with its own emblem, it also established that each party, whether or not it participated in a coalition, had to register its own lists of candidates. The rule that coalitions were considered as a single party for the purposes of allocating seats and multi-member seats was thus removed from COFIPE.

In 2008, the law did not provide that coalitions were exempt from the restrictions of the often-cited Sections IV and V of Article 54 of the constitution.

Moreover, until 2006, the IFE considered that Section V applied to them. Since 2009, the interpretation has been that Section V applies only to individual parties, ignoring what the Court found in the 6/98 unconstitutionality case, which explicitly states that the limits of over-representation apply both to individual parties and to the coalition they form. I repeat: in that judgment and in the judicial thesis that followed from it, the Court interpreted comprehensively the aforementioned Article 54 of our Magna Carta, which, with one exception, has not changed, so that such an interpretation is valid.

Neither IFE/INE nor TEPJF have previously commented on Section IV of Article 54, which sets the limit of 300 deputies. In other words, there is no precedent to which one could refer, since there has never been a case of a party or coalition having more than 300 deputies for both principles. We are faced with an unprecedented fact, which this time the Supreme Chamber must rule on when resolving possible challenges to the INE agreement.

For history, reason and law, for the survival of our democracy, the 300-member limit must apply to coalitions. Next week, five judges of the Supreme Court will put an end to this debate for now.

P.S.This article originally appeared on the magazine’s digital portal. Voice and voting; I have made the necessary adjustments taking into account what was approved on Friday 23rd at INE:

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