TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) - Thousands of Mexicans living in the United States traveled by plane, bus and car to Mexican border cities to vote in Sunday's hotly contested presidential election. The Mexican government set up 86 polling places along the 2,000-mile border, mostly for migrants who missed out on the country's historic absentee ballot campaign.
Across the border from San Diego in Tijuana, a sprawling city of more than 1 million people, out-of-town voters arrived Sunday by bus from Los Angeles and other California cities. Many said they made the trip because they received little information about how to request absentee ballots, lacked the correct voting card, or did not fill out their applications correctly.
Maria Salome Rodriguez, a 38-year-old farm worker, drove eight hours with her husband from Fresno, Calif., and waited for two hours to vote at a polling booth outside Tijuana's airport. She and her husband decided to make the trip to the border after their applications for absentee ballots were rejected because they wrote down the wrong address.
"We want to vote so Mexico can improve and offer jobs to people here, because even though we're far away, our heart is still with our homeland," said Rodriguez, who declined to name the candidate she voted for.
Lawmakers approved a law last year to allow the estimated 10 million Mexicans living in the United States to vote by mail for the first time. But the effort was thrown together to beat electoral deadlines, and only about 32,632 absentee ballots from 71 countries were mailed to the Federal Electoral Institute.
Of those, 479 did not meet requirements and were rejected, electoral officials said.
In addition to Tijuana's regular polling centers for residents, 20 special centers were set up across the city for migrants as well as active-duty soldiers, factory workers and others who have come to the area recently from the interior of the country.
The presidential election is the first since outgoing President Vicente Fox's stunning victory in 2000 ended 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
The race was close between former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, and Felipe Calderon, a former energy secretary from Fox's conservative National Action Party. Running in third place is Roberto Madrazo, the candidate for the PRI.
Salome's husband, 49-year-old construction worker Pedro Hernandez, said he was voting for Calderon.
"I could be resting at home but voting for me is a moral responsibility," Hernandez said. "I'm happy to be part of this because we're living a new democracy, and—who knows?—maybe my vote can decide this election."
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On the Net:
Federal Electoral Institute (with English link):
http://www-site.ife.org.mx/portal/site/ife
