Naming referees that the head cannot control sends a clear signal that the game will not be rigged. In other words, it is nothing more and nothing less than building an IFE/INE, as Mexico did when it said enough to the hell of PRI's frauds. But such a rather human system proved that everyone could win and everyone could lose, and that continuous improvement, as a purpose of amendment if one wants, paid off. Getting to the method of the 2018 and 2024 elections was made possible by the demands of the losers (the left in 1988/2006 to start with), and by the fact that society as a whole got fed up with the risk that the simulation of PRI's frauds would lead us to worse hells. If the farce of appointing counselors who are more experts than nostalgic apparatchiks of the times when Bartlett could decree the fall of the system or assume patriotic frauds comes to pass, the abyss will return. Venezuelan Ricardo Hausmann published in Project Syndicate at the end of February what was truly urgent in his country to begin to get out of the Maduro hell. “What needs to be fixed? The National Electoral Council, which has been under the control of the regime for a long time and presided over the fraudulent elections of 2024, is the obvious starting point. It was created to get us away from hell – he replied, before the lights went out and the council chamber was left in semidarkness. In that juncture, the INE was an actor that could organize the 'biggest in history' election from time to time, but which also, without the protagonism of some of its counselors, saw itself as much more than a referee. Five years later, in the INE are no longer those who, without stinting protagonism, defended an electoral system that was attacked from the government with abuse of official and unofficial resources (lawsuits and administrative processes, etc.), nor three other counselors who, with legal and procedural technique, until this month, when they completed their term, resisted the crude concentration of attributions and open obsequiousness before the government of President Guadalupe Taddei. Today there is an INE ProMorena and Cia that not only takes us away from heaven, but because of the farce – we must call things by their name and what Monreal does in San Lázaro in the process of renewing three counselors is the final co-optation of the INE – it leads us to hell. Beyond Núñez's book – a chronicle of essential chronicles to review and rethink the struggle that for eight years has been given between the defenders of 'the INE is not touched' and the guinda colonizers–, Morena looks decided to revive the demons of fraud. The IFE/INE was never angelic and the processes it organized and ruled were not free of sins. In his new book*, journalist Ernesto Núñez Albarrán recalls a phrase that an official of the National Electoral Institute told him in 2021. 'How do you see things, Jesús,' questioned Núñez, at that time collaborator of the president counselor, Lorenzo Córdova. Jesús Galindo, attached to the Executive Secretariat of the institute and ex-collaborator of José Woldenberg, took me by the arm, made a grimace and let out a phrase that summarized everything: 'The INE was not invented to take us to heaven.' Restoring credibility requires appointing a new Council through a transparent process that involves jurists and civil society, that guarantees the participation of all the main political forces and that establishes solid safeguards against partisan manipulation.
