Mexico to launch ‘impossible’ process to elect 7,000 judges

When Mexicans arrive at voting booths next year to elect their judges for the first time, they face a unique and daunting task.

In the capital Mexico City, voters will have to choose judges for more than 150 positions, including on the Supreme Court, from a list of 1,000 candidates that most people have never heard of. For each of the 150 posts, space will be allotted for voters to write out individually the names of up to 10 preferred candidates.

Without makeshift solutions such as dividing up the judges into subdistricts, it could take 45 minutes just to fill in the ballot papers, one analyst estimated. Even with such fixes, voters will still have to choose from many dozens of unfamiliar names.

“It’s impossible,” said Jaime Olaiz-González, a constitutional theory professor at Mexico’s Universidad Panamericana. “In no country, not even the most backward, have they proposed a system like this.”

The vote will be the culmination of a drive by the country’s leftwing nationalist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to radically overhaul a branch of the state that has frequently angered him by blocking his plans.

Thanks to a two-thirds majority won by the president’s Morena coalition in June elections, Mexico’s congress this week approved a sweeping constitutional change that will fire all the nation’s nearly 7,000 judges and elect their replacements in two ballots, half next year and half in 2027. That will make the nation of 130mn people by far the largest country to try such a process.

Faced with a chorus of criticism within Mexico and internationally, López Obrador has argued that the sweeping changes will cut corruption while making the judiciary more accountable and democratic. Business leaders are worried they will undermine the rule of law and threaten billions of dollars of nearshoring investment.

The president’s Morena party rushed through the legislation — with some calling it a “gift” for their outgoing leader — but crucial details are still missing, with little time to hash them out before campaigns for the judicial roles begin early next year.

López Obrador is in the final month of his six-year term and will hand over to his ally, president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, on October 1. Sheinbaum has strongly backed the plan, telling reporters this month there was “no possibility of reversing the reform” because it was “the decision of the Mexican people”.

Her team have said that secondary legislation to be passed within 90 days will address concerns among investors. But this is likely to flesh out details rather than substantially changing the reform, said legal experts.

“There are things they can do, but the most central parts [of the reform] now have no solution,” said Luis Carlos Ugalde, former head of the electoral institute.

Gerardo Fernández Noroña, president of Mexico’s Senate, maintained that those who designed the reform had thought through the problems.

“It has its complexity, but it has a solution,” he told the Financial Times, adding that the call for candidates had to be carried out within a month. “It’s a titanic task.”

The changes have sharply increased political risk for investors and opened a rift with the US government. Human Rights Watch said the overhaul would “seriously undermine judicial independence” and violate human rights standards.

Under the new rules, sitting judges and magistrates can opt to be put on to the ballot automatically, but the president and congress — both in the hands of the ruling party — will select most of the rest of the candidates. Once the judges are in place, a disciplinary tribunal, its members also elected, will have broad powers to fire them.

“The possibility that you’ll see clear bias from these judges is very high,” said Juan Francisco Torres Landa, a partner at corporate law firm Hogan Lovells. “When you have administrative or fiscal cases against authorities, the probability of a successful result is going to be much, much lower.”

Fernández Noroña, the president of the Senate, said however that “all the problems they say there will be in the new judiciary are the current problems”. He said the country would not be blackmailed by threats of pulling out investment. “Investment will flourish… It won’t benefit just who has more money, but who truly is right.”

In a rare strongly-worded intervention last month, the US ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, said the reform was a “major risk” to Mexico’s democracy and could make the judiciary more vulnerable to organised crime. Opposition leader Alejandro Moreno has said that drug gangs sent messages to lawmakers to get them to approve the reform.

Cash donations without a disclosed source — which is illegal — are already commonplace in Mexican political campaigns, and are rarely traced by authorities.

“We run the risk of being corrupted and penetrated further by organised crime,” former electoral official Ugalde said. “If the United States has a narco-state on its southern border, I think that’s a big problem for them.”

In Mexico, where drug cartels already control large chunks of territory and wield power over significant aspects of national life, judges appointed by the Federal Judicial Council under the current system have been pressured and even killed. The judiciary provides protection to those who are threatened.

Under the new law, organised crime cases can be handled by “anonymous judges”, a process previously used in Colombia, where one-way mirrors and voice distorters were among measures used to ensure judges were unknown to defendants and the public. But that set-up is now criticised by rights groups as unfair to the accused and ripe for abuse by authorities because of the lack of accountability.

“It sounds like a good security measure, but the problem comes if the government uses this figure to investigate people not aligned with their interests,” said a sitting judge who deals with organised crime cases in Mexico. “It’s a very, very dangerous weapon, and more so in these times.”

Organising the vote will cost about $360mn, the president-elect has said. The judicial districts are different from those used by electoral authority INE, complicating the logistics further. Each state will set its own rules and election timeline for local judges, who hear most cases.

Some US states elect local judges, though not federal ones, but only Bolivia — whose hard-left government is allied with Russia and Cuba — holds national elections for the supreme court. There, in the 2017 vote, voters spoiled more than half of the ballots in protest.

The judicial election campaigns will have no public or private funding; television and radio time will be divided among candidates. In the capital, if each candidate had just two minutes to speak, that would result in 33 hours of nonstop programming.

“It’s going to be a circus,” said one media executive.

López Obrador has tried his own experiments in direct democracy before: in 2021 he asked citizens whether authorities should investigate former presidents. Turnout was just 7 per cent, with 98 per cent of those voting in favour of his proposal.

Fernández Noroña argued, however, that criticisms of the judicial votes sprang from a “racist, classist attitude that says the people shouldn’t choose judges, that they aren’t qualified… as if the law didn’t have a political position”.

Existing members of the judiciary have taken to the streets to express their fury at the overhaul. Mexico’s legal system has ground to a halt in recent weeks as a result of strikes. Around 100 judges have opted to take early retirement this year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Some in Mexico hope that current judges will mostly opt in to the election to smooth the transition, but the country’s corporate law firms are preparing for less experienced judges.

“It’ll be like young, recent medicine graduates performing open heart surgery,” Torres Landa said. “Uncertainty is going to be the common thread throughout this tragedy.”