Mexico's leftists again question presidential vote

Source: Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Pre-election polls on Mexico's presidential vote had projected that leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would lose by a double-digit margin.

But with 99 percent of the vote tallied in the preliminary count, Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party trails by just six percentage points behind the election's apparent victor, Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The narrower-than-expected margin is fueling suspicion among Lopez Obrador's followers about the fairness of the vote, and he refused Monday night to concede defeat - just as he did when he lost a razor-thin race in the 2006 presidential race and set off months of political unrest. Although this time, he has not called his followers into the streets to protest.

Lopez Obrador argued from the start of the campaign that pollsters were manipulating pre-election surveys to favor Pena Nieto as a way to boost the idea that the PRI candidate was far out in front.

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