If the popular election of justices, magistrates, and judges was already scandalous from a democratic standpoint, the distribution of “cheat sheets” to voters so they could support ruling party candidates is a complete travesty—one that belongs among the worst electoral practices in democratic systems. These so-called “cheat sheets” or voting guides included the names of candidates close to the ruling party, and the National Electoral Institute (INE) indicated that they could be considered electoral propaganda.

Indeed, on June 7, 100 million Mexicans were called to vote for these positions, yet only about 13 million went to the polls. Of that number, at least 3 million votes were declared invalid, meaning that only 10 million could be considered legitimate.

And there’s more. At the June 16 session of the General Council of the INE, what had occurred a week and a half earlier did not go unnoticed. After collecting and tallying the records from each of the 300 electoral districts, numerous irregularities came to light—leading several council members to question the legitimacy of the election. In fact, 5 of the 11 members of this citizen-led body argued that the electoral process should be declared invalid.

Councilor Claudia Zavala delivered a scathing analysis of what had taken place at the more than 80,000 polling stations set up across the country. She denounced before the full INE board that during the electoral day, millions of cheat sheets—both printed and digital—were distributed with the names of candidates who ultimately won around 80% of the positions. She also highlighted the discovery of ballots that had not been folded (i.e., not folded to be inserted into ballot boxes), ballots marked with identical handwriting, polling stations reporting 100% voter turnout or more, and votes clearly influenced by the cheat sheets. All of this, she said, was part of a coordinated operation backed by unknown financial resources, aimed at orchestrating a national strategy to steer votes in favor of certain candidates—now known to be those aligned with the ruling party.

Councilor Zavala asserted that the mass-distributed cheat sheets were designed to manipulate voting, resulting in the top spots on the Supreme Court of Justice being filled by the very candidates featured on those vote-inducing guides.

With this, three fundamental principles of any democratic election were broken: the authenticity of the process, fairness in the competition, and certainty in the outcome.

Nevertheless, despite the evidence presented by Zavala and supported by four of her colleagues, the majority aligned with the ruling party—led by INE president Guadalupe Taddei—prevailed, thereby blocking the irregularities from being debated by the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary. As a result, the election of the nine justices who will form the new Supreme Court, set to begin its term on September 1st of this year, stands. The Tribunal will only be required to resolve individual citizen appeals.

To better understand what happened on June 16, one must recall the lotteries conducted live by the Legislative Branch to select a third of the candidates. Through other mechanisms, the Executive and Judicial branches did the same.

This illustrates a critical distinction: the shift from a democratic system to an autocratic one was marked by votes secured through undemocratic means. In the Court, there is the vote of Justice Alberto Pérez Dayán, who voted against a project that sought to declare the judicial reform unconstitutional; there is also the vote of Senator Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, who gave the ruling party the qualified majority allegedly in exchange for legal concessions; and in the case at hand, the vote of Councilor Claudia Humphrey, who cast the decisive vote validating the judicial election.

This, despite her own statements before the full INE board acknowledging that there had been “polling stations with extremely high turnout, ballots without fold marks, missing voter lists at polling stations, identical handwriting and numeric sequences on different ballots, the theft of entire ballot packages, and cheat sheets found at polling station entrances or circulating on social media.” Even while recognizing the gravity of the situation, she voted to uphold the validity of the election.

The INE General Council’s declaration validating the judicial election exposes a deep contradiction: the promise to uphold electoral integrity versus the failure to address numerous irregularities.

Far from being routine, the vote count revealed practices reminiscent of the darkest chapters of Mexico’s electoral history—practices the country was thought to have left behind.

Morena and its allies are now preparing to take the next step toward autocracy before year’s end, when they will present an electoral reform initiative in Congress. At the heart of this initiative is a plan to eliminate the current mixed electoral system—where both majority and proportional representation coexist, thus allowing minority representation at the federal, state, and even municipal levels. The leaked design favors a simple majority system, which could lead, at best, to a two-party system dominated by a hegemonic party.

This would effectively close the chapter on the democratic system built through legislative agreements, putting in place all the elements of an autocratic regime with full control over the Mexican state’s public institutions.

_{*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva}