Mexico City.-The National Electoral Institute (INE) is looking to postpone elections to renew the local Congress and the Town Halls in the states of Coahuila and Hidalgo, which are scheduled to take place on June 7, because the coronavirus pandemic impacted the organizational stages of the process. In session of the General Council of the National Electoral Institute (INE), the president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova Vianello and the executive secretary, Edmundo Jacobo Molina, held a meeting with the Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer Varela, exchange information related to the 2020 electoral processes, within the framework of the Coronavirus pandemic.
At that meeting, there was talk of the activities that the Institute decided to temporarily suspend at the Council meeting on Friday, such as the fieldwork for training citizens who were insized to integrate the Casilla Directives (until 19 April), or the closure of the Citizen Care Modules throughout the country until there are sanitary conditions for their reopening. Election process
In addition, Córdova Vianello and Jacobo Molina presented the steps to come in both electoral processes and the dates planned for them: registration of candidates, from 3 to 8 April in Hidalgo and from April 15 to 19 in Coahuila, as well as the different activities that different political parties must carry out to define their candidacies (assemblies, councils, etc.). Election campaigns, from 25 April to 3 June, in both entities; Election day on June 7 in the two states. Alcocer acknowledged that these stages could hardly be adequately carried out during the months of April and May, as it is when the health authorities are contemplating the period in which the main objective will be the flattening of the growth of contagions of the Covid-19 epidemic, starting with the mini-reduction of activities requiring social contact, with the aim of advancing, later on, with the gradual restoration of such activities. Alcocer Varela undertook to bring the information provided to the next session of the General Health Council, which chairs, so that the country’s highest health authority in the current situation can analyze it and issue some recommendation to the NSO, the governing body of the National Electoral System, so that, within its competence, it can decide what is conducive to the ongoing electoral processes. This session of the Health Council could take place earlier next week, as reported by the head of the Ministry of Health.
