AT 8 o'clock yesterday morning, as polls were due to open around the country, four elderly voters waited patiently to cast a ballot in San Bernabe, a working-class neighbourhood of Mexico City. It took another hour to open the booth, by which time dozens of people had joined the queue nodding to neighbours but remaining quiet on their electoral preferences.
Nearby in the upmarket Olympic Village housing complex, half the votes were cast by late morning, an indication that the final turnout will be unusually high. "I've always voted for the opposition but this is the first time that the vote will really count," Jorge Molina (42) said with confidence.
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, opposition favourite in the mayoral race, shared Molina's optimism, and, called on followers to celebrate his victory at a busy city centre junction last night, hours before any reliable results became available. In Ixtapalapa, Mexico city's largest neighbourhood, one million eligible voters spread out over 10,000 voting booths, monitored by 2,500 military police and 10,000 national and international observers.
"This is where the whole thing will be decided, " said one police officer, refusing to be identified.
In the past, complicated vote-rigging procedures fixed everything from the electoral register to the election count, to ensure a clear margin of victory for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI). In the past, observers denounced an arsenal of PRI dirty tricks at election time, including the "carousel", whereby PRI militants loaded up a truck with voters carrying multiple credentials and travelled from booth to booth. Then there was the taco (the Mexican dish consisting of a corn pancake packed with meat and vegetables), where voters deposited a vote with several more concealed within. There were "pregnant" booths, stuffed beforehand with PRI votes, and the "crazy mouse" which involved the unannounced transfer of voting booths to a new location, often the house of a PRI official.
All this is a distant memory, according to the federal electoral institute, which has spent opportunities for fraud. Voting booths are now transparent and have a narrow slit to prevent stuffing, while credentials have a photo and booth number attached.
The opposition had observers at all 100,000 voting booths, another first, The voters are marked with an indelible ink which disappears only when the affected skin is regenerated, or, for the truly devoted fraudster, it can be removed with the vigorous but painful use of a potato peeler.
Cardenas's Party of the Democratic Revolution promised an "insurrection" should fraud be detected in Mexico City, but the absence of any visible irregularities made his bluster redundant.
The only black spot on election day so far has been in Chiapas, south- east Mexico, where unidentified masked men burned at least 10 voting booths in different parts of the state.