Mexican election body denies vote count manipulated

MEXICO CITY, July 10 (Reuters) Mexico's election authority has denied that vote counts were manipulated in the country's contested presidential election, as leftist runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador claims.

The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), which ran last Sunday's election, denied an allegation by Lopez Obrador that the vote count that saw ruling-party conservative Felipe Calderon win by a hair's breadth was bogus.

Rene Miranda, an official in charge of the preliminary vote count for the IFE, said the vote count showing Calderon won, albeit by a tiny margin, was accurate and reliable. ''It always reflected the reality of the country,'' he told a news conference yesterday. ''It's impossible to do any kind of manipulation.'' The initial election result given last night gave Calderon the advantage but was deemed too close to call because of the tight margin. A recount of tally sheets concluded that Calderon won the election by less than one percentage point.

Calderon has yet to be officially named president-elect, however, and Lopez Obrador -- who briefly surged into the lead during the recount -- plans to challenge the result in court.

His aides said they would deliver his petition to the country's electoral court later yesterday.

Mexico has been on tenterhooks all week with the definitive election result still up in the air. The electoral court will have until August 31 to rule on Lopez Obrador's challenge and until September 6 to formally declare the election winner.

Opinion polls before the vote showed Mexico, only a fledgling democracy, was split over whether to join a growing leftist camp in Latin America or stick with the free-market path of the conservative party that came to power in 2000, ending 71 years of one-party rule.

Lopez Obrador, who enjoys celebrity-like popularity in Mexico City after starting welfare programs as mayor, told a chanting crowd of more than 100,000 supporters on Saturday that the electronic counting system was rigged to make him lose.

He said votes had been taken out to favor Calderon, and wanted ballot boxes opened to enable a vote-by-vote recount.

His fraud allegations have not been backed up by European Union election observers, who reported no irregularities.

The leftist campaigned on a promise to pull millions of people out of poverty, but his policies and crowd-pleasing rhetoric alarm many business leaders and investors.

Lopez Obrador accuses his rivals of waging a ''dirty war'' on him after Calderon repeatedly called him a danger to Mexico and the government tried to ban him from the election for ignoring a judge's order in a land dispute while Mexico City mayor.

Mexico's left still remembers a 1988 election widely believed to have been stolen from them by the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled for most of the last century.

REUTERS PDS RAI0435