INE urn and voting booth contract award for 2025 judicial election, Digi Mart USA News (Mexico City): Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) rejected a proposal from Talleres Gráficos de México that would have saved 34.3 million pesos on the manufacture of ballot boxes and voting booths for the 2025 judicial election, citing inconsistencies in two documents submitted to prove experience. The institute then awarded the contract directly to Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones, whose final offer was 26.7 million pesos higher, according to a report published by Más, which cited Animal Político.
The institute’s Internal Control Body (OIC) identified irregularities in the procurement process, including insufficient verification of suppliers’ technical and operational capacity, weaknesses in the market research, and differences in the calculation of penalties for late delivery of electoral materials. OIC head Víctor Hugo Carvente Contreras presented the findings to congressional committees of the Chamber of Deputies on October 30, stating that the results were preliminary and still subject to analysis.
The procurement followed a public tender that INE declared void on February 7, 2025, after none of the bids met all the requirements in notice LP-INE-001/2025, published January 23 of that year. Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones had submitted a joint proposal, but the documentary review found that four of the eight contracts they submitted to demonstrate experience were incomplete, falling short of the five complete contracts required.
After declaring the tender void, INE opened a market research process, IM-0030-2025, inviting nine potential suppliers to submit quotes and samples. Talleres Gráficos de México, a decentralized public body of the Secretariat of the Interior, took part.
Its proposal set prices of 297.08 pesos per electoral ballot box and 233.17 pesos per special voting booth, while Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones had initially quoted 335 pesos and 296 pesos, respectively, before value-added tax.
A comprehensive evaluation report on the 2024-2025 extraordinary judicial election, prepared in November 2025, acknowledged that Talleres Gráficos offered the lowest price and met delivery deadlines and technical specifications, points reviewed with support from the Faculty of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Nevertheless, INE dismissed the proposal because two of the five contracts submitted to demonstrate experience had documentary inconsistencies: one, from the Mexico State electoral body, was missing page 17 of 17, and another, from the Guanajuato electoral institute, contained an annex belonging to the Mexico State authority.
Because of these omissions, the institute concluded that Talleres Gráficos had proven only three complete contracts, even though its proposal met the economic and technical requirements. The report does not specify whether the agency had an opportunity to correct the documents or whether any barrier prevented correcting the inconsistencies.
With that option discarded, INE considered Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones the next lowest-cost option among suppliers meeting the requirements. On February 18, 2025, the Executive Directorate of Electoral Organization requested new quotes, but Talleres Gráficos was no longer included in that request.
In this second round, the companies reduced their prices to 320.88 pesos per ballot box and 282.80 pesos per voting booth, though the difference from Talleres Gráficos’ original proposal remained 26,667,936.64 pesos, a figure later identified by the OIC.
On February 27, 2025, INE directly awarded Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones the manufacture of 63,549 electoral ballot boxes and 432,745 special voting booths. The contract, identified as INE/007/2025, has a minimum value of 165,615,391.38 pesos and a maximum of 198,738,544.10 pesos.
During his appearance, Carvente Contreras questioned whether the institute had objectively verified that the selected companies had the human, material and financial resources needed to supply the products. He also noted that one of the companies added the sale of electoral articles to its corporate purpose on January 20, 2025, just three days before the call for bids was published, although the OIC presentation did not specify which company made that change.
Another concern involved the market research, which included potential bidders whose commercial activities did not necessarily match the materials INE needed to purchase. Carvente questioned whether the participants’ experience and operational capacity had been sufficiently proven.
The official also disputed the justification for the direct award, stating that the Procurement Committee did not adequately demonstrate the exceptions set out in article 50, sections II, IV and VI, of the applicable regulations.
According to the OIC review, the criteria of economy, effectiveness, efficiency and impartiality required for such procedures were also not adequately justified. INE’s Legal Affairs Directorate had analyzed both the direct award and the possible use of the existing framework collaboration agreement between INE and Talleres Gráficos de México.
In document INE/DEAJ/3091/2025, the legal area stated that using the framework agreement required proof of the public body’s technical, material and human capacity, while the void tender allowed for a direct award, and warned that a shortage of ballot boxes and voting booths could jeopardize the organization of the judicial election and the exercise of the vote.
The OIC review also identified delivery delays and differences in the calculation of applicable financial penalties. According to Carvente’s presentation, INE initially set contractual penalties of about 5 million pesos but later reduced them to roughly 26,000 pesos, citing an alleged case of force majeure that the OIC said had not been proven.
The official estimated that the delays should have generated penalties of about 43 million pesos and questioned the reduction, a point included in the preliminary findings on contract compliance.
The findings also relate to an analysis by the Superior Audit Office of the Federation (ASF), which placed the companies identified as C Graph and TOL within a single supplier group called GHC, together with ZEG, Seriplast and Reconstrucción y Comunicación. According to information the ASF presented in the second report of the 2025 Public Account, that group accumulated contracts with various public institutions totaling 2,257.1 million pesos over an analysis covering 2014 to 2026.
That amount covers multiple operations and does not correspond solely to the INE ballot box and voting booth contract.
Separately, the OIC presented an analysis of relationships among shareholders, attorneys-in-fact and legal representatives of electoral materials suppliers, in which José Alfredo Hernández Casillas appears linked to Cajas Graf and Seriplast. Carvente Contreras argued that supplier concentration in the electoral sector is neither new nor exclusive to INE, but also involves contracts awarded by state electoral bodies over several years.
The review leaves two central questions unresolved: what elements led to considering Cajas Graf and TOL Producciones suitable after both had been disqualified in the initial tender for incomplete documentation, and whether Talleres Gráficos de México had an opportunity to correct the documents that led to its exclusion despite submitting the lowest-cost proposal.
