From the New York Times, July 5:

The Mexican electoral crisis deepened Tuesday, as the leftist candidate demanded a vote-by-vote recount and election officials acknowledged that up to three million votes had not been tallied in the preliminary results.

The ballots counted so far showed the conservative, Felipe Calderón, with the narrowest of leads, fewer than 400,000 votes, over his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

On the day before the Federal Electoral Institute, or I.F.E., begins its final official tabulation of an estimated 43 million ballots, questions were raised about the uncounted votes, missing tally sheets, nullified votes and ballots left blank that were registered in the preliminary count...

A few dozen protesters gathered on a major street just south of Central Plaza here, the Zócalo, wearing López Obrador T-shirts. "The election has been robbed!" they shouted. "We will fight!"

[...]

The president of the electoral institute, Luis Carlos Ugalde, stunned many voters on Tuesday morning when he acknowledged in a television interview that the preliminary count could not be used to call the race and that slightly more than three million votes remained to be counted.

He made clear that although many votes could be recounted, it was unlikely that all ballot boxes would be reopened. Mr. Ugalde said those ballots were not tallied because they were illegible or did not reach his offices in time. "It is a matter of human error," Mr. Ugalde said, "not fraud."

[...]

In a news conference on Tuesday, Interior Minister Carlos Abascal played down the possibilities for a ballot-by-ballot recount, saying recounting every ballot was "physically impossible and also legally impossible."

[...]

Senator Jesús Ortega, Mr. López Obrador's campaign manager, demanded that the electoral authorities open all the sealed ballot boxes. "I say for the health of the republic it would be good to recount vote by vote," Mr. Ortega said.

While Mr. López Obrador remained secluded in his apartment, his aides said their surveys of voters leaving polling places showed that he had won, and they predicted that the recount would give him a victory.

"We are not in a power play here," said Manuel Camacho Solís, a former mayor of Mexico City who helped run the campaign. "But we are defending our rights."

Mr. Calderón's aides continued to say the official count later this week would give him the victory.

"In this election, Calderón had the advantage and that will be ratified once the count of all the election boards is finished," said Germán Martínez, the National Action Party representative at the electoral institute.

The count scheduled to begin Wednesday is not new here. The system has been in place since 1994. But it was considered little more than a formality because the last two presidential races were decided by such wide margins that the winners were announced shortly after the polls closed...

The process will be the focus of intense scrutiny by party leaders and ordinary citizens alike. Outside the offices of the election commission, protesters have begun to gather to demand fairness. Some carried ballots marked for Mr. López Obrador that they said they had found in dumpsters in Milpa Alta. Others carried homemade posters, beseeching the election commission, "I.F.E. do not rob our hope."

Excerpts from the New York Times, July 4:

Some Calderón supporters feared that López Obrador would refuse to accept the final results if they showed he had lost and incite unrest.

On the other side, some leftists worried that the government would try to rob López Obrador of the presidency. Calderón belongs to the National Action Party of President Vicente Fox, and was the sitting president's choice to succeed him.

Both candidates fed those worries in television appearances Monday. López Obrador urged his supporters to "have patience" and said he would always "act responsibly."

But he said he would accept defeat only if his own review of the results showed he had lost. He did not rule out calling on supporters for mass marches and other acts of civil disobedience. "If we lost the election, I will recognize it," he said. "But if I won, even by one vote, I am going to defend that triumph."

Calderón, appearing on national television a short while later, declared that the preliminary results showed clearly that he had won and that a few more days of counting would not change that. He called on his opponent to admit defeat and "begin a time of reconciliation and unity among Mexicans."

"I can assure all Mexicans that I won the elections and I have the papers in hand," he said, waving the preliminary results. "It's time to recognize the result," he added. "It's not my triumph. It's the triumph of the people who voted."

The Times openly notes a cynical strategy on the part of Calderon to bait Lopez Obrador into living up to his demagogue stereotype:

Mr. Calderon's strategy seemed to be to declare victory and force Mr. Lopez Obrador into the uncomfortable position of having to challenge the results. If Mr. Lopez Obrador calls for marches to protest the election results, he confirms Mr. Calderon's accusation that he is a rabble-rouser who does not respect democratic institutions.

But the Times also notes that this strategy could backfire, from the perspective of the Mexican elites:

"This society has a huge postponed poverty agenda, and Lopez Obrador speaks for these people [political pollster Dan] Lund said. "If he backs down without defending their votes, he runs the risk of pushing those people out of the electoral arena into other options that are not good for anyone."

On the subject of "pushing people out of the electoral arena into other options..." From AlJazeera, July 2:

Thousands of people have marched through Mexico city on the day of the country's general election in a protest against the major political parties.

The protesters, led by the masked Zapatista rebel leader "Subcommandante" Marcos, claimed that the elections would not offer a solution to the millions of Mexicans who live in poverty.

"Our ideas of justice and liberty are bigger than the ballot boxes," the protesters chanted on Sunday as they marched through the streets to capital's historic Zocalo square.

From the Dallas Morning News, May 25:

Conservative Felipe Calderón opened his campaign for president with slogans focusing on honesty ("Clean Hands") and patriotism ("Passion for Mexico"), but the nice-guy image wasn't working.

So the Harvard-educated lawyer embraced a U.S. style of political attacks against his top rival. He even spoke — informally, his campaign insists — with American consultants such as Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris and Dallas' Rob Allyn, a Republican strategist.

Whether the consultants had anything to do with the change in tactics, no one will say, given Mexico's extreme sensitivity to any appearance of outside influence in elections. But some critics are blaming the gringos for Mexico's plunge into the mud.