Mexican voters face a titanic task this Sunday.
For the first time in the history of the country, they will choose more than two,600 judges and magistrates, including those who will be part of the Supreme Court and hundreds of other federal, state and local courts.
The elections will make the judiciary go from being a system of appointments to one in which voters will choose their judges. Those who support change argue that it makes the system more democratic and attacks problems such as nepotism and corruption. Those who criticize them say that the risk is to give more power to the ruling party and open the courts to unleashed candidates or sufficient qualifications or likely to be influenced by criminal groups, such as cartels.
The experiment is so ambitious, divisive and confusing that it is difficult to know how it will develop: a single voting day will promulgate the broader judicial change that has been carried out in a great democracy.
This is what you have to know about the elections of judges in Mexico, how they work and why they are important.
Why are Mexicans to vote for their judges?
The elections are the culmination of a controversial process in which Morena, the ruling party, and its allies amended the Constitution last year in order to widely modify the court system.
The idea of choosing the judges by popular vote was proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and promoted by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
López Obrador promoted the plan after the Supreme Court issued a series of sentences that blocked some of his government’s plans – such as weakening the electoral observation agency of Mexico and putting the National Guard under military control – and that federal judges issued orders to suspend some of their emblematic projects, claiming environmental problems.
Annoyed by these sentences, who described as politically motivated, López Obrador urged his bases to help consolidate the control of Morena in Congress. The huge majorities obtained by the party in the general elections of last year have allowed its legislators to approve a series of constitutional changes that will redesign the judicial system.
How will the elections of the Judiciary work?
On Sunday, voters will choose half the Judiciary of Mexico, and the rest in 2027.
This year almost 880 positions of federal judges will be at stake, from district judges to magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. In addition, 19 of the 32 states of the country will choose local judges and magistrates to cover about 1,800 positions.
More than 7700 candidates postulate those positions. Unlike ordinary elections, in which political parties can finance the campaigns of their candidates, judges aspiring cannot have public or private financing, which forces them to use their own resources and a marketing of guerrillas on social networks to attract attention.
To try to guide voters, the agency that supervises the vote created an online platform so that people can familiarize themselves with candidates. Even so, even some supporters of the measure recognize that it will be difficult for voters to choose with knowledge of cause among thousands of candidates largely unknown.
In a recent survey that Sheinbaum mentioned during his daily press conference to try to show his support for the experiment, 72 percent of a thousand voters surveyed said the judicial election was necessary. But only a small part of them, 23 percent, knew who the candidates were.
“They are going to vote blindly,” he said in an interview on the radio this week Heidi Osuna, director of the agency that supervised the survey. Many voters without information, he said, very possibly “do not attend to vote.”
Will the elections improve the judicial system?
This has been a matter of debate for months.
Those who support the elections often speak of a system full of corruption and nepotism in which justice is more accessible to those who can pay it and where dozens of judges have been co -opted by one or more violent cartels.
In fact, Mexicans perceive judges among the most corrupt officials in the country, only surpassed by traffic police.
A system in which the judges are elected, their defenders affirm, will break the links that some have with powerful criminals, corrupt officials and elite members. Instead, they argue, the judges will now respond to the interests of the one who voted for them: the Mexican people.
While critics admit that the Judicial Power of Mexico faces enormous problems and needs a deep change, they claim that this is not the way to fix it.
Several experts have argued that the measure will politicize courts that should impart justice independently, and that the official party, Morena, that the Presidency and Congress already holds, will exert an extraordinary influence on the vote. They have also said that a direct election system runs the risk of allowing little qualified candidates to become judges and opens the door to a greater influence of the cartels.
When will the results of the judges elections in Mexico be known?
Mexico votes with paper ballots, and all must be counted by hand.
Unlike other Mexican elections, in which the preliminary results are known on the night of the elections, the results for the Federal Judiciary, including the highest court, will be announced in the days after the vote.
Subscriber content
The national voting count that will determine the final results will be June 15.