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Dubbed the voto en blanco, or "blank vote," the curious movement emerged on blogs and in YouTube videos when campaigns kicked off last month. Since then it has snowballed, with prominent intellectuals and several politicians themselves joining its ranks. Its simple message: the whole political system stinks, so just draw one big cross on the ballot sheet on July 5, when the country has to choose the federal Senate and 500-seat lower House, six governors and hundreds of state and municipal offices. "Voting for the least bad candidate is like buying the least rotten fruit," says Jose Antonio Crespo...
...representatives' six-figure salaries in a nation where the minimum wage is $5 a day. And while video evidence has shown prominent politicians stacking wads of dollar bills into briefcases or extorting businessmen, the same candidates keep beating the courts and getting back on the ballot. For the voto en blanco movement, Mexico has swung from dictatorship to a kleptocracy. One YouTube video for the campaign shows supposed politicians from the three main parties laughing as they tear into a cake shaped like Mexico. (See pictures of the tunnel technology of Mexico's drug cartels...
...successful is the voto en blanco campaign? The Demotecnia survey found only 3% of respondents saying they would deliberately annul their vote, suggesting the loud campaign is having a limited effect. "This is a very élitist movement of university professors and wealthy young people on the Internet," says Demotecnia president Maria de las Heras. "The media are covering it so much because it is something fun and different. But it will not have any long-term impact on Mexico's political system...
...many people participating in the rally Monday said the scale of it was understandable. "Of course people would show up en masse. They know who they voted for," said 44-year-old Ahmad, who pulled out his wallet to show an ID to prove that he was a war veteran. "I was on the war front for eight years. This is not what we had a revolution for, so that they would...
...filthy; Harry Smith, the CBS news anchor, called the city "Calcutta without the cows." New York was nearly bankrupt, and the President was disinclined to help, provoking the Daily News to the decade's iconic headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." An army of the emotionally disturbed, evicted en masse from state mental hospitals, made cardboard-box homes on the streets. Graffiti festooned many tenement buildings and scarred the exteriors and interiors of the city's decrepit transit system. Sitting inside a subway car, with its garish scrawls, was like being trapped in someone's deranged mind, screaming out madness...