Long Lines for One Thing That Does Work in Mexico - Voter ID Cards David Agren - Fox News Latino
go to original January 17, 2015

MORELIA, Mexico –  José Feliciano Hernández arrived mid-afternoon to renew his voter ID card at a strip mall in this western Mexican city – only to find 200 people waiting in line ahead of him.

...“You need it for everything,” Feliciano, 25, said, while waiting on a day off from work. “To enter a bar, a nightclub, they demand the [INE] card.”

Mexico demands an official voter identification to participate in local, state and federal elections – no exceptions. Elections held July 7 will renew the entire 500-seat lower house of Congress and choose governors in nine states, but come as the country’s political class is consumed by controversy over crime and corruption scandals and the disappearance of 43 teaching college students.

Conditions in states such as Michoacán, where the federal government has appointed a commissioner to calm a tense situation with self-defense groups, and Guerrero, where the students disappeared and are presumed to have been killed, also appear far from ideal for holding elections

The INE card, which was introduced in the early 1990s to inspire confidence in elections in a country with a history of vote scandals and stories of unscrupulous operatives from the then-dominant Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) plying poor voters with sandwiches and soft drinks, then filling out ballots for the recently fed.

Some Mexicans might express misgivings about the outcomes of elections in recent years – the close 2006 vote and a 2012 contest tainted by allegations of vote buying and questionable media coverage – but not the card.

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