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By KELIN DILLON

Following news that Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) had excluded 39,764 Mexicans living abroad from being eligible to vote in the nation’s upcoming June elections, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) announced he had turned to the Secretariat of Foreign Relations (SRE) and Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB) to resolve the issue with the INE during his daily morning press conference on Monday, April 15.

“Yes, let the secretariats inform us, it would be the day after tomorrow, they have time to investigate, to request reports from the INE and to look for options and alternatives for our countrymen to participate in the election,” said AMLO at the time, noting he had given both the SRE and SEGOB until Wednesday, April 17 to issue a report.

“I’ve asked the Secretary of Foreign Affairs to seek more information and to meet with the Secretary of the Interior, Luisa María Alcalde, with the president of the INE, with the counselors to discuss this matter because if it is an issue that is coming from afar, obstacles are always put in front of migrants, that’s why very few participate voting and, their possibility of participating is limited,” continued the federal executive.

However, according to the INE, the 39,724 applications the autonomous electoral institution rejected were denied due to inconsistencies in the potential voters’ submissions flagged as fraud.

“We prioritized applications based on atypical behaviors detected in the records,” said INE Counselor Arturo Castillo. “We saw how the records had behaved from IP addresses around the world and we saw what the behavior patterns were like, and where certain things caught our attention, such as IPs with many records, we said: let’s check there.”

Meanwhile, the INE approved 180,686 applications in total – or 82 percent of the overall application pool.

The INE went on to say that rejected applicants would be allowed to correct their submissions until May 5, with Castillo saying that “the fact that there is or we have detected vitally patterned behavior of that consistent massive irregular behavior makes us think that there could be the possibility of a crime.”

“These people are not losing their right to vote. They are not being excluded from the possibility of voting. Another important issue: we are doing this second review to guarantee the integrity of the nominal voters list abroad,” concluded the INE counselor.

For their part, Mexico’s presidential candidates Claudia Sheinbaum, Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez all publicly requested that the INE fix the application rejections to give all Mexicans living abroad a fair chance of voting in the June 2 elections.