Mexico: AMLO Pledges Crackdown on Electoral Fraud

Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly know as AMLO said on Friday that, if elected, he will seek punishment for those who participate in electoral fraud and use public resources to promote candidates.

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With the country's general elections scheduled for July 1, AMLO, who is running under the National Regeneration Movement, or Morena, criticized governors who “are very quiet” when faced with claims of election fraud in their districts.

"The governors are very quiet, they are not committing themselves to defend the vote, and they are involved in campaigning and using money from the budget, not in all cases, but the majority are involved in the electoral process, “AMLO said.

“I am waiting for them to declare that they respect the vote of the citizens, and not to participate in fraud. I will pay close attention to everyone, the behavior of the governors, and if they use resources to buy votes, that's called fraud... Democracy must prevail in Mexico. "

With Mexico's general elections scheduled to take place on July 1, the website of the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, was hit by a cyber-attack during the final televised debate Tuesday.

PAN representatives, targeting AMLO who leads presidential polls in voting intention, claimed that their site likely suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber attack with the bulk of traffic to the site nominally coming from Russia and China.

Lopez Obrador, however, brushed off suggestions of Russian ties to the cyber-attack, jokingly calling himself “Andres Manuelovich.”

His Morena party denied any involvement in the outage and Lopez Obrador has condemned violence in the election campaign on several occasions.