Power

There were elections in Mexico last Sunday July 2, 2006. Up to today it is a tie between the current president's party and the opposition. In Mexico the president cannot be reelected. The six year term is all one president has to implement his or her government plan. The decision on the next president must be taken before early September of this year.

Is there any relevant science here?

Politics is relevant, that is how power is established. A president affects the lives of many people. The question is that if science is an issue in this important event of mexican life.

There are some technical issues related to the election, like the official count update stopped on monday night:

http://www.unam.mx/elecciones2006/

Today the electoral commission is counting the ballots to reach a definite conclusion.

From a technical point of view this shows that electoral processes have not used the most current technology for counting votes.

One scientific issue I can consider here is the statistical distribution of random processes, in most random events events follow the law of big numbers, leading to a bell-shaped curve. I do not have graphs for the election yet, but if there was tampering with the numbers, those curves could be one of the places where one can look for illegal intervention to modify the results.