An election right out of the Bush playbook

And this one isn't even in the U.S.

Mexico endured a new cycle of suspense on Wednesday as the authorities tabulated their final official count of votes from Sunday's disputed presidential election, in which preliminary results separated the candidates by less than one percent.

With tallies taken from about 93 percent of the polling places, the electoral authorities reported that the count had tilted toward the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had 36 percent of the vote, while the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, had 35 percent.

But with a race this close, elections officials said they would not announce a winner until all the tally sheets had been counted. As the night wore on, Mr. López Obrador's lead steadily narrowed as tallies arrived from the northwestern states that voted heavily in favor of Mr. Calderón. Even some of Mr. Lopez Obrador's advisers acknowledged privately that they were not confident their candidate's lead would hold.

The final tally, usually little more than a formality, turned into another cliffhanger of a moment in the most competitive presidential race in Mexican history. As the count ticked along on newspaper Web sites into the night, the president of the electoral institute said he would announce the final results as soon as he had them, no matter the hour.

Leaders of the Calderón campaign were huddled at their party headquarters. Officials from Mr. López Obrador's campaign remained at the electoral institute, making clear they would not recognize the results until there was a vote-by-vote recount.

The expectation among election observers was that any result would again be challenged, this time in an electoral court.

Security was increased around the presidential palace and the electoral institute, where authorities expected protests if the final results did not go in Mr. López Obrador's favor.

Still, for most of the day the official tallies indicated a shift from the preliminary count, which had shown Mr. Calderón in the lead from the beginning, and had ended giving him a feather-thin margin, 0.6 percent.

The official count began amid a volatile political storm kicked up Tuesday by the announcement by federal electoral authorities that some three million votes went untabulated in the preliminary count; by demands from Mr. López Obrador for a vote-by-vote recount; and by objections to those demands from the government.

Mr. Calderón, backed by big business and President Vicente Fox, appeared before the news media to repeat his claims of victory. Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who has the support of the poor, held his own news conference to restate his case that the election had been rigged.

He said his campaign had uncovered irregularities at tens of thousands of polling places. Among them, he said, there were polls where the numbers of votes exceeded either the numbers of registered voters or the numbers of ballots. He said that in some cases votes from a single polling place had been tabulated several times.

If James Baker shows up, you'll know for certain that the fix is in.

UPDATE: Surprise, surprise:

Mexico's conservative presidential candidate Felipe Calderon appeared headed for a razor-thin victory on Thursday although his leftist rival could fight the result with legal challenges and street protests.

Calderon had 35.62 percent support with results in from 97.84 percent of polling stations, just 0.05 points ahead of anti-poverty campaigner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a tense vote recount, the Federal Electoral Institute said.

Lopez Obrador had led the recount from the start but Calderon caught up and overtook him in the early hours of Thursday as late returns came in from northern and western Mexico, his conservative strongholds.

Funny how the votes of the conservative districts ALWAYS come in later than the others. This sounds like the Ohio Hackett/Schmidt special election, in which returns from Clermont County, Schmidt's home district, came in very late due to -- are you reacy -- a "technical malfunction" with the district's optical scanners due to the "humid weather."

Anyone see a pattern here?