Mexico’s national electoral authority, INE, said on Monday that voter participation in Sunday’s judicial election was estimated to range between 12.57% and 13.32%. It added that thousands of officials throughout the country are currently engaged in verifying the ballots cast by citizens.
Counting is set to conclude on June 15, but INE officials estimated the turnout using a calculation based on several samples across the country.
Mexicans had a day earlier voted in the country’s first ever judicial elections to elect 2,600 judges and magistrates, including all Supreme Court justices, but pollsters had warned of poor turnout over boycott calls by the opposition and the complexity of voting for a large number of candidates.
Election A ‘Complete Success’
“The historic judicial election of June 1, 2025, has been a complete success,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said in a video message late on Sunday.
“Close to 13 million Mexicans went out to exercise for the first time in history their right to decide who should be the new ministers, magistrates and judges.”
Mexico has a population of around 130 million. Voting is not mandatory and there is no minimum turnout required to legitimize an election.
Sheinbaum, who inherited the judicial election project from her predecessor and mentor former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has backed the vote as a way to democratize justice and root out corruption and nepotism.
Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum say the election will root out corruption in a flawed judiciary dominated by an out-of-touch elite and instead allow people to decide who should be a judge.
The right-wing PAN opposition party had called on supporters to boycott the election, branding it a “vulgar fraud,” but Sheinbaum has vigorously defended her predecessor’s reform and her party has sought to mobilize the grassroots vote.
However, critics say it could remove checks and balances on the executive power and allow for organized crime groups to wield greater influence by running their own candidates.
(With inputs from Reuters)
