Who were the independent candidates in the 2018 elections who submitted false signatures

Former Governor Jaime Rodríguez Calderón El Bronco was arrested on the morning of March 15, as reported by the Nuevo León State Prosecutor's Office through the Specialized Prosecutor's Office for Electoral Crimes with support from the State Civil Force.

Likewise, the governor of the entity, Samuel García, published on his social networks about the detention against the political controversy: “We finally succeeded”, since the current state president had filed a complaint since 2018 for allegedly diversion of public resources for his presidential campaign.

In May 2018, the National Electoral Institute (INE) fined Jaime Rodríguez 739,000 pesos after detecting an illegal financing scheme that used around 12.800,000 pesos to obtain the signatures needed to approve his presidential candidacy as an independent.

Jaime Rodríguez, better known as “The Bronco” for his controversial statements and frankness, was an independent presidential candidate in the 2018 contest. It was the first elections in which citizens were able to contest without the need for a political party, thanks to an electoral reform in 2014 that opened up this possibility.

The requirements to be able to win the candidacy were to obtain around 866,000 voter signatures to ensure their presence on the ballot. The supports were to be distributed in 17 states with 1% of each entity's records.

Apart from the discussions that were formed due to the lack of independent candidates, since all three belonged to parties and had the financial means, there were complaints about the number of signatures required for registration, which without funding, could not be easily obtained by other contenders.

Of the 48 people who sought a candidacy, only three people with a political past succeeded, the panist Margarita Zavala, the Perredist Senator Armando Ríos Piter and, of course, Rodríguez Calderón, who spent 33 years in the PRI.

And then came that of the signatures obtained by the three applicants, since practically all candidates for the presidential candidacy, according to the validation of INE rubrics, had included numerous signatures in the registers fraudulently.

The one who won the prize was Senator Ríos Piter, who of the million 700,000 signatures he submitted, 900,000 of these were recognized as false.

This was followed by El Bronco, which submitted about 338,000 false signatures among the 2 million rubrics gathered. While Margarita Zavala obtained 870,000 signatures that allowed her to obtain the registration of her candidacy, but not without having been discarded at least 219,000 because they were considered false by the Institute.

Rios Piter was withdrawn from the contest, while Zavala and El Bronco continued in the contest. Rodríguez Calderón had been withdrawn by the INE, but after a ruling in his favor by the Electoral Tribunal, he was able to continue in the electoral process.

Apart from the Bronco, Samuel García denounced another 595 public servants to the State Anti-Corruption and Electoral Crimes Prosecutors in 2018 for alleged money laundering and the misuse of resources in favor of the governor's presidential project, who was at that time an independent candidate for president.

It should also be noted that in recent days the accounts of two collaborators of the former governor were frozen: Manuel Vital, former Secretary of Sustainable Development, and María de los Angeles Errisúriz, who served as head of Education.

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