Mexico's Election Chief Quits After an Election Contractor Filmed Champagne Toasts With Her Son in Paris

Mexico's top election official is out. Guadalupe Taddei, president of the National Electoral Institute (INE), the agency that runs every federal election in the country, said Sunday she would hand her resignation to the Chamber of Deputies on Monday. She goes eight months before Mexico's June 2027 midterms, when voters will pick a new Chamber of Deputies and 17 governors.

She didn't leave over a policy fight. She left after a week of videos showing her and her son living it up with a man whose companies print and supply Mexico's election materials, and after federal auditors opened an investigation into how the INE hands out its contracts.

In a short statement posted by the INE, Taddei said she was quitting to "protect the institute" and that her exit "does not relieve anyone of the duty to clarify" the facts under investigation. She took no questions. Quotes here are translated from Spanish.

The contractor and the champagne

The man at the center is José Alfredo Hernández Casillas, legal representative of Cajas Graf, one of the INE's suppliers of election materials. Journalist Carlos Loret de Mola's outlet Latinus broke the videos. The first, aired Oct. 20, was filmed Sept. 15 and shows the contractor leading a toast with Taddei: "Long live friendship! Long live loyalty!"

Three nights later Latinus aired the one that sank her. Filmed by Hernández Casillas himself in a suite at Le Meurice in Paris, it shows him pouring champagne with Taddei's son, Jorge Francisco Piña Taddei. "Paris at your feet, kiddo," the contractor says. Loret reported the suite runs about 200,000 pesos a night, and that the businessman has received 245 million pesos in INE contracts. Another clip shows him filming Taddei at his home in Mexico City's upscale Jardines del Pedregal: "Filming the queen." Her reply: "Oh, Alfredo, you're too much."

Loret also reported that Hernández Casillas has been landing government work since Taddei ran Sonora's state election institute from 2014 to 2021. Picture a referee whose favorite equipment supplier is flying her kid to Paris. Even if every whistle was fair, nobody trusts the game.

The auditors move in

On Oct. 23, Mexico's federal audit office, the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (ASF), announced an investigation of its own. It said it already has "elements and indications related to irregularities in various contracts, possible conflicts of interest, collusion and triangulation of resources" at the INE. Triangulation is bookkeeping slang for routing money through a chain of companies so it's hard to follow.

The newspaper Reforma, which had earlier reported a probe by the Finance Ministry's Financial Intelligence Unit into seven companies tied to Hernández Casillas, went further. Citing people close to the audit, it reported irregularities in 514 million pesos of contracts with his companies. One of them, Corporativo ZEG, won 184 million pesos in INE contracts with just five registered employees, then moved 167 million of it to four other companies, Reforma reported. Another, TOL Producciones, got more than 300 million pesos in INE work in 2025 and has been sanctioned by Mexico's tax authorities for simulated operations, according to the audit findings Reforma described.

Taddei has denied having "favorite companies" and said the contracts were legal. On Oct. 24 the INE's presidency said she welcomed the audit, which it called consistent with what she herself had requested. That same day, Latinus reported, she told her fellow councillors she would not resign. By Sunday afternoon she was gone.

Picked by lottery

Here's the part that should bother anyone who cares about clean elections. Taddei never won a real vote for the job. In March 2023 the Chamber of Deputies, controlled by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's Morena party and its allies, couldn't reach the two-thirds needed to choose INE leaders, so the law sent it to a drawing. Her name came out of the box. She was sworn in April 4, 2023, for a term meant to run to 2032.

Opposition lawmakers say that's how the INE got here. Elías Lixa, who leads the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in the Chamber, said Monday it "cannot repeat the mistakes that brought us here" and warned against "a designation decided in advance from the offices of the government and Morena." Citizens' Movement's Ivonne Ortega noted her party was the only one to vote against picking councillors "by raffle."

Sheinbaum's spin

President Claudia Sheinbaum blessed the exit at her Monday morning press conference. "She made a decision to step down in the face of the accusations," Sheinbaum said. "Obviously there has to be an investigation, there has to be an audit." She called it "a good decision," then turned her fire on the critics, calling attacks on Taddei's personal life "cowardly and misogynistic."

Morena's leader in the Chamber, Ricardo Monreal, went further on X, claiming the resignation "confirms that in this government there is no protection for anyone." Within hours the post had drawn more replies than likes.

What happens next

Under Mexican election law, the INE's General Council picks one of its own members as interim president. The Chamber of Deputies then has to choose a permanent replacement by a two-thirds vote, a process Monreal has said will take four to five weeks. That puts a brand-new referee in charge of an election season that formally opened Sept. 10.

The ASF investigation covers the INE, the state election bodies, the companies and the officials tied to them. None of the people named in this story has been charged with a crime. The big question now is whether anyone follows the money, or whether one resignation closes the case.