Mexico elections: Lopez Obrador says 5M votes bought

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing runner-up in Mexico’s presidential election, said today he had evidence that five million votes were bought.

Lopez Obrador said he would submit proof of vote buying to electoral authorities on Thursday, according to Mexican news agency Notimex.

More from GlobalPost: Mexico election: Votes for sale

The silver-haired candidate for the Party of the Democratic Revolution, who lost the 2006 election by a razor-thin margin, has refused to recognize the results of the July 1 poll.

According to El Universal, the official tally announced Sunday showed Lopez Obrador finished second with 31.59 percent of the vote, or about 3.3 million votes behind the winner, Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who won 38.21 percent of the vote.

"We cannot accept those results," Lopez Obrador said today, according to Reuters.

"We have evidence to support this and when the time is right we are going to prove that around 5 million votes were bought."

On Sunday, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Mexico City to protest Pena Nieto’s victory, accusing the PRI of buying votes.

More from GlobalPost: Mexico elections: Tens of thousands protest results

Smaller marches were held around the country, including Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city in the central state of Jalisco where the PRI candidate was elected governor.

The Associated Press interviewed shoppers at Soriana supermarkets in the days after the election who were seeking to redeem pre-paid gift cards they said were given to them by the PRI.

Pena Nieto has rejected the vote-buying charges and accused Lopez Obrador of sour grapes. 

An official recount of more than half of the ballots last week confirmed the results.

More from GlobalPost: Mexico 2012 elections coverage