Low turnout in Mexico’s far-reaching judicial election fuels legitimacy concerns

A woman distributes pamphlets of candidates by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation building in Mexico City, Mexico, on May 28, 2025. The election to overhaul Mexico’s courts could result in a justice system more beholden to the nation’s dominant party, Morena. (Luis Antonio Rojas/The New York Times)

By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, James Wagner and Simon Romero

Mexico’s sweeping reorganization of its judicial system got off to a rocky start. The nationwide election of thousands of judges over the weekend was marked by an exceptionally high level of abstention, with nearly 90% of voters opting not to take part.

Only 12.6% to 13.3% of voters cast ballots in Sunday’s election, according to estimates from the national electoral authority, fueling legitimacy concerns. That means the contentious judicial election had one of the lowest turnouts in any federal election since the early 2000s, when Mexico transitioned to a democracy.

The dismal turnout points to the confusion and indecision across the country over the election, which shifts the judiciary from an appointment-based system to one in which voters choose judges. Supporters of the plan have argued that it makes the system more democratic, while critics have characterized it as a power grab by the governing leftist Morena party.

Some voters who did turn out expressed puzzlement over the bewildering number of candidates vying for nearly 2,700 judgeships, including those who will sit on the Supreme Court and hundreds of other federal and local tribunals. Electoral monitoring groups reported that several voters simply used cheat sheets provided by Morena, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s party.

“It did not seem to me to be a democratic exercise — it was a clear attempt to manipulate the vote,” said Laurence Pantin, an expert on judicial independence and director of Juicio Justo, or Fair Trial, a nonprofit organization that seeks to broaden access to justice in Mexico.

Pantin and other volunteers said they had detected several irregularities Sunday, including voters carrying printed sheets indicating which candidates to select, multiple people entering voting booths at once and voters taking photos of their filled ballots — a possible indication of vote buying.

“There was an effort by Morena or groups related to the government to mobilize people,” Pantin said.

Ricardo Anaya, a senator and former presidential candidate for the center-right National Action Party, said on social media that the low turnout and voters’ lack of knowledge about whom to vote for amounted to an “absolute failure.”

“This isn’t democracy,” Anaya said. “It’s an insult.”

Facing such criticism, Sheinbaum on Monday called the judicial election an “unprecedented, impressive, wonderful, democratic” event, even though the electoral authorities had forecast that turnout could reach a somewhat higher level of 20%. By contrast, turnout was about 60% in last year’s election, in which Sheinbaum won the presidency.

Still, she said that the high end of the estimated voter turnout, 13%, was double that for a 2021 referendum on whether to investigate former presidents, which saw a participation of about 7%.

But the stakes were much lower in 2021, when the government was simply polling the population. This time, in one of the most far-reaching judicial overhauls attempted by any major democracy, voters were called upon to replace about half of Mexico’s judges; they will elect the rest in 2027.

The idea to elect judges by popular vote was proposed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s predecessor as president and her political mentor. He contended that the overhaul was needed to root out corruption and nepotism, and he pushed for it after the Supreme Court and federal judges stymied or blocked some of his flagship infrastructure projects and plans, like weakening Mexico’s electoral watchdog agency.

Because Mexico votes with paper ballots, which must be counted by hand, results for the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, were not expected to be announced until Monday or later this week. Still, preliminary results made available Monday signaled that various candidates aligned with the governing party were expected to win seats on the Supreme Court.

Opposition figures and legal experts had feared such an outcome, arguing that Morena could use its current popularity among voters to consolidate control over the judiciary well into the future, eroding the separation of powers in Mexico’s political system.

Despite such concerns, some voters said they were simply perplexed by having to vote for so many judges at the same time.

“I didn’t know anyone,” said Jorge López Lozoya, 58, who voted in Ciudad Juárez, across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. “So I just picked eeny, meeny, miny, moe to see how it turns out.”

Viri Ríos, a political analyst, said that voter turnout had been similar to that for judicial elections elsewhere in the world — albeit smaller in scale than Mexico’s — and that any institutional overhaul would generate problems and not be seamless.

She added, however, that these elections would pose a “serious problem” for Morena down the road, because “solving the problems of the judicial system is complex.”

Many Mexicans agree that the judicial system needed reform. But now that the overhaul pushed by Morena has been achieved, Ríos said, the party will have to show results.

“Morena promised that after this reform the administration of justice would be improved,” she said. “If that doesn’t happen, then for the first time in the history of Mexico, we’re going to have a party that is directly responsible for it.”

Arturo Castillo Loza, a member of the electoral agency’s governing body, called the election a huge undertaking, “organized in an extremely adverse context,” in which all three branches of government hindered the process.

The agency received only a small fraction of the money it had requested to organize the election, and Congress denied requests to delay the election by two months, Castillo said. Adding to the confusion, the judiciary filed more than 600 legal actions to stop the vote, even though it was opposing an election that had already been enshrined in the constitution.