The Morena party’s parliamentary group in the Chamber of Deputies yesterday sent two reform initiatives to the Permanent Commission—one constitutional and the other concerning secondary laws—to establish proven foreign interference as a new ground for annulling electoral processes.
At a press conference, the coordinator of the Morena caucus, Ricardo Monreal Ávila, explained that the first of their proposals seeks to add a subsection D to Article 41 of the Constitution. This would allow for the annulment of elections when it is proven that there was “intervention by foreign individuals, organizations, or governments with the intention of influencing preferences or electoral results.”
After specifying that foreign interference “can manifest itself through financing, cyberattacks, coordinated disinformation campaigns, or diplomatic pressure,” with the purpose of “undermining the political independence of the State,” the legislator pointed out that current regulations do not address this phenomenon.
This deficiency, he warned, “creates a technical gap that hinders the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF) from acting with the necessary speed and decisiveness in the face of external interference that compromises national sovereignty.”
The second initiative—proposed as a complement to the first—aims to modify several provisions of the General Law of the System of Legal Remedies in Electoral Matters, in order to recognize such interference as a “serious irregularity.”
Furthermore, Article 78 Ter would be added to the aforementioned law to establish that annulment due to external interference will result in extraordinary elections, in which the political parties that have benefited from such interference will not be allowed to participate.
That same article specifies that foreign interference in the electoral sphere will be “any conduct that involves intervention, meddling, financing, pressure, manipulation, coercion, or any act intended to unduly influence the organization, development, or results of federal or local electoral processes.”
Furthermore, Monreal expressed the support of the Morena party caucus for Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum’s initiative to create a commission to verify the integrity of candidacies. In this regard, he emphasized that “the opposition should vote in favor, because they have insisted quite a bit that people linked to crime should not be allowed to participate in elections.”
After acknowledging that this reform would grant greater powers to the National Electoral Institute (INE) and the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), the legislator defended the relevance of the proposal, considering that “it could be a turning point” in preventing alleged criminals from running for public office.
Monreal confirmed that both his proposals on annulment due to foreign interference and those sent by the head of the Executive regarding the verification commission and the postponement of the judicial elections will be discussed in the next extraordinary session.
Source: jornada
