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The Mexican election is shaping up to be Hanging Chads II: The Re-Chaddening. This one appears to include blatant vote-hiding:

The margin between the two leading candidates for president narrowed suddenly Tuesday after election authorities revealed that about 2.5 million votes had been missing from earlier counts. The announcement meant the race between leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon was still too close to call.

An initial count of the ballots gave a slim but apparently insurmountable lead to Calderon. On Monday evening, Calderon was leading Lopez Obrador by 402,708 votes, with 98.45% of polling stations "processed," according to official reports.

But election authorities acknowledged Tuesday that the preliminary count did not include vote totals from more than 11,000 stations where "irregularities" were noted in official paperwork. Those stations were listed as "processed" in the official reports, but their votes were not included in the tally.

Late Tuesday, election officials added the 2.5 million votes to the public count. Lopez Obrador outpolled Calderon on these ballots by more than 145,000 votes, narrowing Calderon's lead to slightly more than 257,000 ballots, or 0.6 percentage point.

Election authorities said that as many as 900,000 votes remained to be added to the official tally because polling station results had not yet arrived at regional election headquarters. An undetermined number are from the remotest rural areas of southern Mexico, which lean toward Lopez Obrador.

And today, preliminary vote counts show Lopez Obrador in the lead by a couple percentage points. These are not recounts forced by one candidate or the other (though Lopez Obrador has asked for one), but federally mandated recounts administered by the election commission.

I remember the conservosphere all over stories about election fraud in places like Ukraine and Georgia and other former Soviet states. That was evidence of the flourishing of democracy. Now here's a story where 2.5 million votes went missing on Election Day, and a recount is showing that the purported first-place candidate may not have won. In fact, most states where Calderon emerged victorious posted more votes for President than for the Senate, but in the States that went for AMLO, more votes were cast for Senate than for President. Last year, Lopez Obrador was arrested by Vicente Fox's government (same party as Calderon) and an attempt was made to bar him from running for President. Now, it looks more and more likely that the powers that be are trying to steal the election to bar him from being President.

Not a peep from the conservosphere. Because, see, Lopez Obrador is a LEFTIST. Booga-booga!

But Mexican bloggers are all over this story:

The fast-moving electoral controversy appears to be driven as much by Lopez Obrador's grassroots supporters as by the candidate himself, and it has illustrated the emerging power of Mexico's bloggers.

On Monday morning, Lopez Obrador had stated meekly in public that he would accept defeat if announced by the Federal Electoral Institute. That appearance, in which his haggard face seemed depressed and defeated, detonated a whirlwind of Internet organizing. Within hours, his supporters had deluged the headquarters of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, with e-mails alleging inconsistencies in the vote counting and reporting process.

PRD bloggers furiously gathered allegations about fraud and distributed instructions on how to report problems to the PRD campaign and how to contact the media. By Monday night, Lopez Obrador had emerged again and announced that his party's lawyers would lodge legal appeals with the electoral institute's independent tribunal. He cited several photos of apparently contrasting poll booth count documents that had been sent to him, and he repeatedly asked his followers to keep up the e-mail barrage.

"In the meantime, we are going to ask, or keep asking, the citizens to keep helping us find many inconsistencies," said Lopez Obrador.

This is slowly becoming a full-fledged scandal. It's anybody's guess how it will end.