Mexico's national election authority announced a recount of ballots cast at more than half of the polling stations in the country's weekend presidential election in which Enrique Pena Nieto claimed victory.
Edmundo Jacobo, a top official with the (IFE), made the announcement a day after leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who came in second in the vote, demanded a full vote recount, claiming that the results were "fraudulent."
Lopez Obrador, who heads a leftist coalition led by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), accused Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the vote that included distributing 1.8 million gift cards.
The first official results from Sunday's vote showed Lopez Obrador with 31 percent of the vote against 38 percent for Pena Nieto. IFE officials have until Sunday to deliver the final official vote count, but it may come sooner.
"There is no president-elect," said Lopez Obrador's campaign coordinator Ricardo Monreal, said Wednesday. "There is no candidate that has been elected, and whoever tries to use that title is an impostor."
Observers fear Lopez Obrador's refusal to concede could trigger a repeat of the 2006 presidential election, when he lost by less than one percent, claimed fraud and organized mass protests that paralyzed Mexico City for more than a month.
Voters in Sunday's presidential and legislative elections allegedly showed PRI officials a cell phone picture of their paper ballot to "prove" they voted for the PRI, and received gift cards in return.
"Just look at what happened in the Soriana stores ... with the panic purchases from millions of cards of people who went to cash in" on their vote, Monreal said in a radio debate with his PRI and National Action Party (PAN) counterparts, Luis Videgaray and Roberto Gil.
Soriana, a major Mexican store chain, printed a full-page ad on Wednesday after their shops were swamped by people rushing to buy products with gift cards they apparently feared might be canceled soon by the authorities.
It is "absolutely false" that cards with the logo of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, a major pro-PRI union, contained cash, "because those cards only offer discounts and loyalty points," Soriana said.
The PAN's Gil agreed that, aside from breaking campaign spending limits, the PRI benefited from slanted media coverage and skewed polls.
Videgaray insisted that the PRI won a clean victory. "If the votes are counted again, we'll still come out winners," he said.
PRI spokesman Eduardo Sanchez flatly rejected the gift card charges.
"We have not handed out any cards. Neither the Enrique Pena Nieto campaign nor the PRI have any connection to those cards," he said.
Before the vote the leftist PRD filed an official complaint with election officials over alleged PRI gift cards to be used at PEMEX gasoline stations. Separately, the conservative PAN filed a complaint about alleged PRI bank cash cards.
The percentage difference in Sunday's vote amounts to some three million votes, election officials say, a wider margin than in the last presidential election but closer than various pre-vote surveys had indicated.
"It makes little sense to carry out a recount," said Jose Antonio Crespo with the CIDE graduate school. "That was the problem in 2006."
The vote buying charges are more serious, but "it will be hard to prove that vote buying in 25 percent of the polling stations determined the vote outcome at each of those stations."
The IFE has until September 6 to resolve balloting complaints and formally announce the winner.
The PRI was synonymous with the Mexican state as it governed for seven decades until 2000 using a mixture of pervasive patronage, selective repression, rigged elections and widespread bribery.
There is no run-off vote in Mexican presidential elections, meaning that about 62 percent of the electorate did not vote for Pena Nieto.
Marches are likely to follow in coming days and will tap into that anger, but it is unclear how long they will last, or how many people will follow Lopez Obrador.
Leaders around the world, including US President Barack Obama, have already congratulated Pena Nieto on his apparent victory.
