Synchronization

Jorge Buendía takes on the idea that Mexico's elections should be synchronized in his column this week. I've heard this argument before, and like Buendía, I don't find it particularly convincing. The idea is that electoral fatigue encourages people not to vote, but unless you think "fatigue" is synonymous with "organic lack of interest," I am deeply skeptical that fatigue plays much of a role. Plus, I rather like the irregular occurrence of elections around the nation every few months. It serves as a concrete marker of a party's progress at a given moment, and provides me with an easy topic to write about every so often. Buendía points out another reason to oppose electoral synchronization; because Mexico's politicians are so upwardly ambitious (a consequence of the reelection prohibition), and because pols must resign from one post before campaigning for another, electing every office on the same day would offer officials "powerful incentives to look for another post without having concluded the period for which they were elected."

He doesn't offer this as evidence, but Buendía might have put forth Mexico City as evidence. The city's mayor (the second most prominent official in the nation) serves the same term as the president, and typically has presidential ambitions himself. As a result, none of the mayors elected since 1997 (when the direct election was reinstalled for the first time in almost 70 years) have finished their term, nor is Marcelo Ebrard likely to be the first. Mexico City's government would be a lot better off if the mayor's term expired a year or so before the president's.