Mexico's Judicial Elections Can And Should Be Improved

Electing judges is good but the 4T should take stock of the June election's shortcomings and make improvements.

A year after Claudia Sheinbaum and the ruling Morena party’s landslide victories at the ballot box, voters returned to the polls on June 1st to elect half of all federal judges—around 2600, including all nine members of the Supreme Court. If your news on Mexico comes from sources favorable to the 4T—as the ruling coalition is colloquially known—you probably heard that the election was a resounding success in participatory democracy. Except, the key flaw with this narrative is that the upper case People didn’t participate in the elections to any meaningful degree.

Approximately 13% of registered voters took part in the June elections—a record low for a federal election in Mexico. Worse, the number of invalid and blank ballots was also historic at over 20% of the vote; in some cases, null and blank votes exceeded those of the winning candidates. Most candidates were complete unknowns to the vast majority of voters and an overly complicated ballot caused unnecessary confusion. To be sure, many in the opposition boycotted the election although that accounts for around a third of the electorate at most.

Of course, if your media diet comes from opposition and English language sources (the two are functionally the same), you probably heard tales of elected ‘narco-judges’ and the broader downfall of Mexican democracy. Never mind the fact that one of the election’s most virulent critics—former president Ernesto Zedillo—packed the entirety of the Supreme Court in 1994.