Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

As in Florida in 2000, and as in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls show the voters voted for the progressive candidate. The race is "officially" too close to call. But they will call it - after they steal it.

Reuters reports that, as of 8pm eastern time, as voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls showed Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the "leftwing" party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderón of the ruling conservative National Action party (PAN).

We've said again and again: exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can't tell pollsters whether their vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art, not a science - and Calderón's ruling crew is very artful indeed. The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly, has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.

Calderón's election is openly supported by the Bush administration.

On the ground in Mexico city, our news team reports accusations from inside the Obrador campaign that operatives of the PAN had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation's electoral commission. We are not surprised.

This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico's voter files under a secret "counter-terrorism" contract with the database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The FBI's contractor states that following the arrest of ChoicePoint agents by the Mexican government, the company returned or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known that collecting this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful in challenging a voter's right to cast a ballot or in preventing that vote from counting.

It is, of course, impossible to know whether the FBI destroyed its own copy of the files of Mexico's voter rolls obtained by ChoicePoint or whether these were then used to illegally assist the Calderon candidacy. But we can see the results: as in the US, first in Florida, then in Ohio, the exit polls are at odds with "official" polls.

The problem with that is that he's sending progressives to bark up the wrong tree; as the Institute for Policy Studies' Chuck Collins, an observer with the Global Exchange delegation, reports on the front page, the real issues to watch -- and let's hope any irregularities aren't enough to sway the outcome -- are vote-buying by party operatives, local officials telling poor, rural voters that they'll lose access to public services if they don't vote "correctly" and various forms of voter intimidation.

The last thing anyone needs in what is shaping up to be a hyper-charged post-balloting environment is a bunch of conspiracy theories about the Mexican electoral institutions themselves.

Do you notice what's missing here? An actual allegation. Palast throws the name ChoicePoint out there -- a bogeyman for the left if ever there was one -- but doesn't connect it in any way with Mexico's electoral authorities. Remember, his excellent reporting on ChoicePoint's involvement in the 2000 Florida vote revealed that Katherine Harris had ordered the company to purge tens of thousands of voters from the official voter rolls, most of whom turned out to be eligible African-American voters. Nothing like that in this case.

Mexican authorities actually arrested the ChoicePoint operatives for creating the list in question, but Palast says, bizarrely, that the arrests simply proved that "Mexico's attorney general did [it] to avoid his party from looking too much the stooge of its Washington patron." Huh?

It gets worse…

In 1988, the candidate for Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR), who opinion polls showed as a certain winner, somehow came up short against the incumbent party of the ruling elite. Some of the electoral tricks were far from subtle. In the state of Guerrero, the PDR was leading on official tally sheets by 359,369. Oddly, the official final count was 309,202 for the ruling party, only 182,874 for the PDR.

It's simply irresponsible to discuss the blatantly stolen 1988 election without also telling his readers that Mexico's electoral institutions have undergone radical, dramatic reforms since then (which I touched on last week).

Chuck Collins, in his reality-based analysis, also discusses the 1988 vote, but follows it with this:

But the Mexican electoral system has come a long way since 1988 and even 2000. The independent Federal Election Institute is well-resourced, politically independent, and by all accounts ran a fairly clean election.

That last point is crucial to understanding the complete nonsense Palast is peddling in his column in today's The Guardian. In it, he refers, as he did Friday, to "The PAN-controlled official electoral commission."

According to every single observer except Greg Palast, the Federal Election Institute (IFE) is completely independent. The IFE ordered Vicente Fox -- PAN's outgoing president -- to keep his nose out of the campaign. They ordered Felipe Calderon's ads off the air more than once because they were misleading or defamatory. Last week, I noted that José Salafranca, head of the EU's observer mission, told Inter Press Service that Mexico's electoral institutions are now among the most reliable and trustworthy in the world.

But Palast has to put the IFE in PAN's pocket, or else his column today -- read and no doubt believed by many -- falls apart entirely …