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'Mexico' held a 'general election' on Sunday, July 2 2000.
At stake were the Presidency of the Republic, all 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies, and all 128 members of the Senate. Several local elections (state governorships, etc.) were also held on the same day.

Contents

Presidential election

Results by state

Congress of the Union

Presidential election

The 2 July 2000 elections marked the first time since the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution that the opposition defeated the party in government. Vicente Fox won the election with 43% of the vote, followed by PRI candidate Francisco Labastida with 36%, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution Party) (PRD) with 17%.
Despite some isolated incidents of irregularities and problems, such as one in the southern state of Campeche which involved the European Union electoral observer Rocco Buttiglione and which could have created problems for President Ernesto Zedillo had the PRI candidate won, there was little evidence that those incidents were centrally coordinated (as opposed to led by local PRI officials) and critics concluded that the irregularities that occurred did not alter the outcome of the presidential vote, which was more definitive than expected. Civic organizations fielded more than 80,000 trained electoral observers, foreign observers were invited to witness the process, and numerous "quick count" operations and exit polls (not all of them independent) validated the official vote tabulation. The largest exit poll was organized by the U.S. firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, financed by a hitherto obscure outfit in Dallas called Democracy Watch (later it emerged that Democracy Watch was essentially set up by Fox campaign insiders to help prevent an expected election fraud).
Numerous electoral reforms implemented since 1989 aided in the opening of the Mexican political system, and since then opposition parties made historic gains in elections at all levels. The chief electoral concerns shifted from outright fraud to campaign fairness issues and, between 1995 and 1996, the political parties negotiated constitutional amendments to address these issues. The legislation implemented included major points of consensus that had been worked out with the opposition parties. Under the new laws, public financing predominated over private contributions to political parties, procedures for auditing parties were tightened, and the authority and independence of the electoral institutions were strengthened. The court system was also given greatly expanded authority to hear civil rights cases on electoral matters brought by individuals or groups. In short, the extensive reform efforts of the 1990s "leveled the playing field" for the parties.

Results by state

Based on the official results of the Federal Electoral Institute

State	Fox	Labastida	Cárdenas	Rincon	Camacho	Muñoz	Write-in	None
Aguascalientes	'202,335'	127,134	26,264	9,467	2,202	1,389	83	6,291
Baja California	'429,194'	319,477	77,340	14,562	3,470	3,080	507	14,965
Baja California Sur	'60,834'	56,230	45,229	2,107	460	364	17	2,804
Campeche	104,498	'106,347'	35,090	2,485	1,406	1,247	559	9,309
Chiapas	288,204	'469,392'	272,182	5,340	4,659	4,063	1,056	44,551
Chihuahua	'549,177'	460,931	76,810	11,569	4,487	3,166	609	21,350
Coahuila	'398,800'	311,480	77,393	10,392	2,111	1,880	1,454	12,464
Colima	'106,445'	81,099	23,313	3,159	1,028	542	39	4,377
Distrito Federal	'1,928,035'	1,060,227	1,146,131	149,312	36,383	18,843	2,009	75,669
Durango	211,361	'222,892'	50,592	6,144	1,579	1,469	859	9,294
Guanajuato	'1,128,780'	517,815	121,489	18,248	10,800	8,473	2,873	49,039
Guerrero	174,962	'402,091'	332,091	6,179	2,913	3,003	954	20,180
Hidalgo	282,864	'355,565'	136,861	12,319	5,034	4,078	758	19,997
Jalisco	'1,392,535'	941,962	163,269	45,494	17,567	11,110	3,287	48,736
México	'2,239,750'	1,637,714	961,876	121,137	40,733	27,203	3,416	92,743
Michoacán	419,188	441,871	'543,804'	13,058	7,444	6,404	2,060	30,448
Morelos	'290,639'	193,861	124,368	12,539	2,916	3,010	136	12,296
Nayarit	107,417	'173,479'	63,121	3,092	1,175	1,024	351	7,043
Nuevo León	'760,093'	615,907	96,637	20,448	7,478	2,658	1,519	27,201
Oaxaca	301,195	'486,496'	282,587	11,074	8,372	7,305	1,851	39,616
Puebla	'732,435'	698,974	208,688	20,170	8,609	7,849	1,142	44,305
Querétaro	'290,977'	192,622	39,629	10,585	3,768	8,670	170	13,849
Quintana Roo	'132,383'	94,202	50,487	2,399	916	729	70	5,216
San Luis Potosí	'393,997'	324,234	72,599	11,073	3,306	2,287	407	22,673
Sinaloa	230,777	'621,329'	90,488	7,205	2,189	1,675	1,290	15,920
Sonora	'447,496'	292,267	114,580	6,426	1,672	1,325	94	13,269
Tabasco	174,840	'269,519'	213,983	5,817	2,599	1,732	655	14,036
Tamaulipas	'521,486'	445,737	91,426	9,387	3,210	6,932	1,157	19,659
Tlaxcala	123,880	'127,163'	82,073	5,185	2,508	1,450	53	6,639
Veracruz	'1,066,719'	1,008,933	491,791	25,474	11,343	10,956	985	58,630
Yucatán	'328,503'	321,392	27,214	4,258	1,344	987	602	13,127
Zacatecas	169,837	'197,336'	117,375	6,277	2,908	1,993	439	12,461
'Total'	'15,989,636'	13,579,718	6,256,780	592,381	206,589	156,896	31,461	788,157

Congress of the Union

Party	Deputies	Senators
PAN & PVEM "Alliance for Change"	221	51
PRI	211	60
PRD, PT, PAS, CD, PSN  "Alliance for Mexico"	68	17
'Totals'	500	128

The Congress of the Union is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. Consecutive re-election is prohibited. Senators are elected to six-year terms, and deputies serve three-year terms. The Senate's 128 seats are filled by a mixture of direct-election (96) and proportional representation (32). In the lower chamber, 300 deputies are directly elected to represent single-member districts, and 200 are selected by a modified form of proportional representation from five electoral regions. The 200 proportional representation seats were created to help smaller parties gain access to the Chamber.
Even before the new electoral laws were passed, opposition parties were beginning to secure an increasing voice in Mexico's political system. A substantial number of candidates from opposition parties had won election to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate in previous elections. After the 2000 election, however, the Congress was more diverse than ever.