According to a wire report in this morning’s Los Angeles Times, the much-discussed plan to allow Mexican expatriates the right to vote seems to have attracted little interest from Mexicans living abroad. As of the Wednesday deadline for determination of the final number of absentee ballot requests, the Federal Electoral Institute claimed a total of 56,749 valid absentee ballot applications were received.

Each of these 56,749 will receive an absentee ballot sent out between April 15 and May 20.

We’ve written before about how hard the process was for Mexicans living abroad to request and obtain an absentee ballot, clearly the data now bears out the predictions by many (including us) that the difficult provisions will lead to a low abstentee voting rate.