The Federal Elections Registry (Registro Federal Electoral, RFE) which maintains lists of registered voters was scrambling to meet the demand of citizens wishing to register only days before the deadline for the upcoming congressional and local elections to be held on July 6. The last day to register was January 15 in order to give various political parties enough time to review the RFE voter rosters before the elections. Any citizen who turns 18 by July 6 is eligible to vote.
On the deadline date, thousands of first time registrants showed up in Ciudad Juarez in order to do so. Each station calculated they had between 400 and 800 people waiting in line for up to 8 hours. Some of the voter registration stations ran out of registration slips and extra workers were being called in to assist. Stations were opened at 10:00 am with lines forming immediately and getting worse as the day wore on until closure at 8:00 pm. Stations had been registering about 300 per day in the days leading up to the deadline when those numbers jumped to 600 to 800 citizens.
The Federal Electoral Insititute (Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE) has announced that by the 11th of January, there were 51.5 million Mexicans registered to vote, an increase of 4.31 million voters from the previous elections in August of 1994 when current President Ernesto Zedillo was elected. The IFE said 2.5 million new voters enrolled in the RFE during the three month period between October 1996 and January 1997 and estimated that 70% of the voters registering since October 1996 were between the ages of 17 and 22. The RFE will be working from January 15 through March to give out the credentials necessary for voting to those who have recently registered.
For more on voter registration, please see related story in November issue.
Sources: Diario de Juarez, SourceMex