Mexico City leads protest vote in mid-term elections

MEXICO CITY, July 7 (Xinhua) -- About 10.7 percent of voters in Mexico City nullified their votes in Sunday's mid-term elections following a media campaign to use null vote as a protest against Mexico's major parties, a leading pollster said on Tuesday.

The city's protest vote was close to double the 5.4 percent seen in the nation as a whole although the null vote level was enough to trigger recounts in 20 percent of the polling stations across the country.

In the last two mid-term elections in 1997 and 2003, the nation registered 2.8 and 3.4 percent of null vote respectively.

"Mexico City was the heart of the vote nullification movement and the media attuned middle class was the key demographic," said Daniel Lund, who runs polling firm Research in Global Demographics in Mexico City. "These levels are truly remarkable and merit serious reflection," he added.

According to Lund, the nullification has been more of a problem for Mexico's left-wing Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), which lost ground in Sunday's election and dropped into third place from the second in the legislature.

"Those that annulled are disproportionately PRD, who are angry with the parties' many voices that end up as a cacophony," Lund said. That could spur the exit of the party's president, Jesus Ortega, and a bid to restructure the party, he added.

Mexico's Federal Electoral Agency issued preliminary results of the vote on Monday ahead of a detailed count that will run from Wednesday to Saturday. Final confirmed results will be published on Sunday.

The early count showed that the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) was likely take first place in the lower house, doubling its number of seats to more than 210. The ruling National Action Party was knocked into second place with 27.9 percent of the vote, compared to 36.6 percent for the PRI.