^[1]CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO: While in the midst of studying for my university exams I got home one day and found a letter that said that I had been selected to monitor the July 2009 parliamentary elections.

In Mexico, election monitors are selected randomly from groups of people born in the same month and in the same year.

At first I was not sure if I would do it or not but then I thought to myself that somebody had to do it and that it was my duty to volunteer my time.

There were several stages to the process. I had to attend an orientation session in which they told me that my polling location would have a president, a secretary, a first and a second monitor, and two backups, if anyone of the above failed to show up on election day.

Then in June I received the notice that I would be the second monitor. I was supposed to undergo a one-on-one training session but the person responsible for me never showed up. In the end, I only got some booklets explaining how the elections worked (you can see them pictured above).

On July 5th, the day of the election, I got up at 7:00 a.m. and walked to my assigned polling station, which was a block away from my house. There were four booths and I was assigned to the first one, where people whose last name started with letters from A to D would vote.

We were late in setting up the booth because the secretary was not there. When we figured out that he was not going to come I was promoted to first monitor and one of the backups became the second monitor. The people were already in line, eager to vote, and some became verbally abusive because of the delay.

My job was to apply indelible ink on the fingers of voters. It was not hard but many people got angry because they wanted to get as little ink as possible on their fingers.

There were also people who despite living in the neighborhood were not supposed to vote in the polling station where I was working and they got quite angry when they found out that their names were not on our list.

Once the voting was over, I had to read the votes out loud. In my booth the results were: PAN 70, PRI 52, null votes 29, and other parties collecting the remainder.

Null votes are an interesting phenomenon. People often deliberately forfeit their vote by scribbling messages on the ballot paper. It’s a form of protest. One person wrote: “In my house one burglary, one kidnapping, and two assaults, and you want my vote?” Another message said: “I don’t vote for rats.”

I got out of the polling station at 7:30 p.m. and even though my head hurt and I was tired I was happy that I had participated.

The next day the results showed that the PAN had won in Ciudad Juárez but had lost to the PRI in most of the country. I think this shows that people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. Ciudad Juárez had a PRI mayor, and the state (Chihuahua) had a PRI governor, so people voted for the PAN. In the parts of the country where the PAN was already in power, though, people voted for the PRI. It seems to me that the Mexican people did not vote for their preferred party or candidate—they voted against the parties and candidates in power.