Electorally Ep. 3 | Mexico: An Election Built on Mistrust

In 1988, the vote count in Mexico stopped in the middle of the night, and when it started again the ruling party had won. Mexicans still call it the night the system crashed. What the country built after that is very different from how we vote in the US: an independent election institute, polling stations run by ordinary citizens picked at random, one day of voting on a Sunday, and no ballots by mail. Saadia talks with Rodrigo Cervantes, a bilingual journalist who has spent years explaining Mexico to American audiences. He was the Mexico City bureau chief for KJZZ, the public radio station in Phoenix, and a senior editor at LAist, and he teaches journalism at Arizona State University. They talk about the 2024 election, when Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and why many Mexicans didn't see that as the headline Americans did. Rodrigo explains what left and right mean in Mexico, why some people call the ruling party PRI 2.0, and why Xóchitl Gálvez lost. They get into the darker side of the campaign, where at least 37 candidates were killed, many of them running for local office, and the supermajority that let the new government change the constitution so Mexicans now elect their judges. They also talk about how Mexicans in the US vote online, and a Spanish word for the people bussed to political rallies in exchange for a sandwich, which Saadia says describes Pakistan just as well.

Find Rodrigo Cervantes on LinkedIn.

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Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial Review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound I Cover art for the Series: Sarah DiMichele

Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.

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