A total of 79,454,802 people will decide who is to be the next President of Mexico this Sunday as well as choosing somebody to fill one of 2,126 positions elected by popular vote like senators, representatives, mayors and governors.

Citizens will have 10 hours to vote, from 8 am (13.00 GMT) to 4 pm (23.00 GMT) in a big part of the country as well as its capital. Mexico has three time zones making states from the northwest like Baja California close two hours later than the central ones.

There are 143,151 ballot boxes all over Mexico for which the help of 1,002,057 citizens is needed according to the Federal Institution of Elections (IFE in Spanish), body in charge of organizing the elections.

Four candidates are contending for Mexico's Presidency either representing a party or a coalition. Josefina Vázquez Mota is the candidate presented by the National Action Party (PAN) while Gabriel Quadri is the representative of the New Alliance Party (PANAL).

By coalition are competing Enrique Peña Nieto for Commitment For Mexico formed by the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) plus the Green Party (PVEM); the other coalition contender is Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the Progressive Movement formed by the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the Working Party (PT) and the Citizen Movement (MC).

In those 2,217 positions elected by popular vote are not only the president but 128 senators and 500 federal representatives; the grand total of the Parliament's seats.

Six states will be choosing their governor as well (Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Tabasco and Yucatán); the Federal District will select their Chief of Government (Mayor).

There have been 29 candidates proposed to contend for the position of governor or mayor of these seven places each one of them representing the same parties as the presidential candidates except clustered in different coalitions as well as representing local parties.

In these states and 9 more (Campeche, Colima, State of Mexico, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nuevo León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí and Sonora) there will be local elections to choose 579 local representatives, 876 city councils, 16 chiefs of district and 20 city boards.

The first round of preliminary results will be made public at 11:45 pm local time (04.45 GTM) thanks to "Speed Counting" a statistical system the IFE uses to predict tendencies in the final outcome by selecting a sample depicting the totality of ballot boxes used on the day of the elections.

At the same time, the Program of Electoral Preliminary Results' (PREP by its initials in Spanish) will launch the minute the voting ends. The PREP is an electronic mechanism that analyzes and immediately discloses the preliminary outcome of the senators', representatives' and president elections. These are not definitive.

The IFE will begin broadcasting these same first round results since the closing of the voting units and throughout the next 24 hours.

It will be until July 4 when the definitive ballot counting of the 300 Mexican electoral districts will begin. Only if there is a specific petition will the votes be counted again one by one and only if the request is justified by law.

To protect the citizens' rights, the Attorney's Office Specialized in Dealing with Electoral Offenses (FEPADE in Spanish) has qualified nearly 220,000 people in matters of electoral protection and electoral offenses prevention; there will be 116 itinerant cells of personalized attention to report potential frauds.

But the political parties have designated their own electoral agents that will be present in almost all of the booths. Only in one of the voting booths there will be a single party representative, in 46 of them there will be 2 agents and the remaining 143,004 booths will have at least 3 representatives of each party.

The IFE has prepared all of its facilities throughout the country as recipients of electoral offenses reports.

There will also be 31,401 Mexican electoral observers approved by the IFE as well as 696 foreign observers.

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