Mexican voters will make history this Sunday as they are likely to elect the first female president.
Leading the vote is Morena candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, former Mexico City Mayor, scientist and shared-recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Sheinbaum is a long-time associate of outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who won the majority vote in the 2018 election.
AMLO leaves a favorable legacy after addressing social issues to uplift Mexico’s most impoverished communities, such as increasing the minimum wage by 20%. He exits his tenure with the highest approval rate among every Mexican president in the last twenty years, based on recent polling by Reforma, which will likely favor Morena candidate Sheinbaum.
Sheinbaum faces PAN candidate Xochitl Galvez, a former Senator and tech entrepreneur of Otomi Indigenous descent, who has been a fierce critic of the AMLO presidency and his handling of healthcare and crime.
A third candidate, Jorge Alvarez Maynez from the Citizen Movement party, also trails far behind the two women candidates.
This election is the biggest in the country’s history, with more than 20,000 congressional and local positions to be filled, according to the Associated Press.
With over 100 million registered voters in Mexico, according to the National Electoral Institute, the election is set for a historic turnout, even for Mexican nationals living abroad.
An estimated 223,961 Mexican nationals abroad are also set to submit their vote via mail, online or in-person, a 23% jump from the previous presidential foreign election registrations.
Though the registration period was finalized on Feb. 25, up to 1,500 Mexican nationals with a voting ID card are eligible to vote in-person at the four Consulates with electronic voting machines including Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Montreal.
In Illinois alone, 10,560 Mexican citizens have already registered to vote, with over half opting for electronic voting, a new module that was implemented during a special Senatorial election in 2020.
For more information on voting, visit the National Electoral Institute.