A large number of ballots were annulled with messages against gender violence and femicide

During the June 6 election in Mexico, a large number of ballots were annulled with messages against gender violence and femicide, not only in Mexico City, but all over the country.

A woman annulled her vote to elect the mayor in Mexico City’s Cuauhtémoc district writing: “No more femicides! We want our women alive!”.

For Wendy Figueroa, general director of the Red Nacional de Refugios A.C., the invalid votes with these messages “are the result of the persecution of feminists, of the invisibility of the violence we suffer. The authority spent all of 2020 delegitimizing our struggle and we are very clear about the criminalization and the number of victims that keeps growing every day”.

Figueroa assured that there was no call from feminist groups to annul the vote, but rather that it was “an individual decision of the voters” and insisted that these annulled votes and their messages “reflect the weariness and desperation of women with empty promises of authority, fed up with simulations that don’t transform women’s lives.”.

She considered that the messages expressed by the women in the ballots have to serve “so that all political parties take into account the violence that we have denounced.” She added that there has been constant repression of feminists from the federal government and the local governments in each Mexican state.

Source: Excelsior