Friday, March 4, 2011

Mexico City electoral institute wants expatriate voters for 2012 mayor election

The electoral institute of the Federal District-Mexico City, IEDF, announced it would work toward allowing residents of Mexico City outside of Mexico - about half a million defeños are estimated to live abroad - to vote in the 2012 election for mayor of Mexico City.

DF will then join Zacatecas and Michoacán in terms of allowing its expatriates to vote on the local executive.

No details were released on exactly how this will be achieved; with the 2006 failure in mind, where only a tiny fraction of those residing abroad (meaning the United States) actually voted - a result that a recent (2010) scholarly work by James McCann, Wayne Cornelius, and David Lea ("Absentee Voting and Transnational Civic Engagement among Mexican Expatriates," in this edited volume) attributed chiefly to high bureaucratic hurdles - clearly the IEDF needs to take proactive steps to make this a real option.

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