John Brewer, an attorney at Fried Frank in New York, posted the following to another listserv.  With his permission, I am posting it here.
 
 
          Best,
 
          Daniel Lowenstein
          UCLA Law School
          405 Hilgard
          Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
          310-825-5148

________________________________

From: Brewer, John W.
Sent: Thu 7/13/2006 10:00 AM
To: 
Subject:Mexico and the Electoral College




Michael Barone linked to state-by-state results in the Mexican presidential race, which are here:

http://www.elecciones2006.unam.mx/PREP2006/PRESIDENTE/nacional_Pre.html

You can see a map showing the strong regional tendencies in the results here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3A2006_Mexican_election_per_state.png. 

Unfortunately the map isn't shaded to indicate strength of support / margin of victory, because the interesting point from the numbers is that although the race was very close nationally it was generally not at all close locally.  Some states were blowout victories for Calderon; others for AMLO; indeed although the PRI candidate (3d place nationally) did not win any states, he was a strong second in a number of places, meaning that in those places one of the two leading candidates finished third.  Even where the victor did not win in a blowout the margin of victory is generally such as to be beyond the influence of fortuitous logistical mishaps or fraud of a level sufficiently discreet as to be easily concealable.  Only one or two states (Campeche and perhaps Veracruz) seem at first glance close enough to think the outcome might be within the plausible margin of error of an inherently imperfect process.  So if the Mexicans used something analogous to our Electoral College, w!
 ith winner-take-all credit for state-by-state victories, they might have gotten a much cleaner outcome.  It's possible (you'd have to assign plausible weights to the different states after getting population numbers) that one or the other candidate might have won a clean victory even disregarding the handful of states with narrow margins, because his votes were more widely distributed geographically.  Or in the alternative it's possible that you'd have a Florida-like situation where at least you could focus your energies on fighting about alleged irregularities in the handful of outcome-determinative localities rather than worrying about every precinct nationwide. 

               [John asked me to excise his concluding comments, part of which were specifically directed to the other listserv.  He speculates that if there was in fact significant fraud in the Mexican election (on which he expresses no opinion), it is plausible to suppose it was concentrated in the most one-party regions, in which case the fraud  would have been reduced in significance in an electoral college setup.  Finally, he suggests that all these points argue against the desirability of adopting a nationwide popular vote in the United States.  Since I am paraphrasing, probably this paragraph should be attributed to me more than to John.]

JWB
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