MORELIA, Mexico ? Mexicans voted in the western state of Michoacan in a crucial political test Sunday for President Felipe Calderon in his home state, where his sister sought the governor's post.
Voters also were electing 40 federal congressional representatives and 112 mayors following dozens of drug cartel-related attacks over the last two years targeting local officials in the state.
The vote count was going very slowly Sunday night. With less than less than 4 percent of the polling stations reporting, the governor's race was a dead heat.
The election was being watched as an indicator for Mexico's presidential election next year, for which opinion polls have been indicating that Calderon's conservative National Action Party, or PAN, will struggle to retain the presidency.
The vote results also would reflect more clearly on the president, whose sister, Luisa Maria "Cocoa" Calderon, ran for the governorship in the family's home state where the president launched his offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.
Luisa Maria Calderon promised to advance her brother's anti-drug campaign and led in most opinion polls going into the vote, the last state election before the presidential contest in July. A victory would boost the morale of the PAN, which has held the presidency since 2000 but has been hurt recently by voter fatigue over drug violence.
Such violence has been a main concern in Michoacan and many people feared it could disrupt Sunday's vote.
Jesus Zambrano Grijalvo, president of the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD, said his party sympathizers in a mountainous zone plagued by drug violence were being intimidated by organized crime gangs and pressured not to vote. Zambrano did not go into details at a news conference Sunday.
Residents of the rural city of Cheran refused to let poll workers into their town amid demands for an election that they said would respect their customs and traditions. The indigenous Purepecha people who live in Cheran have in recent months wielded rifles and mounted roadblocks keeping out suspected illegal loggers and drug traffickers.
The Michoacan Electoral Institute said in a news release Sunday that officials were still unable to carry out elections in Cheran and were determining how the 16,000 residents there will elect their leaders. Voting continued elsewhere in the state, despite the problems in Cheran.
In the city of La Piedad, a local newspaper published on Sunday an unsigned note blaming the PAN for drug killings and threatening the party's supporters. News reports said the newspaper had been forced to publish the warning.
"Don't wear T-shirts or PAN advertising because we don't want to confuse you and have innocent people die," read the note, which was also circulated by email.
It was not immediately clear who sent the email or published the newspaper ad, which came 11 days after La Piedad Mayor Ricardo Guzman was shot dead while handing out leaflets for several PAN candidates, including Luisa Maria Calderon. No arrests have been made in the attack.
Twitter users claiming to belong to the "Anonymous" hackers movement said they were behind an attack on the website of a party backing Luisa Maria Calderon. The tweets also said hackers attacked the Michoacan Electoral Institute's website, the site where election results are announced and which had been down for hours.
The PAN has yet to win a governorship in Michoacan, and the PRD has dominated federal offices and the presidential vote there since 2000. Local offices have been a toss-up between the PRD and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Calderon faced PRD candidate Silvano Aureoles Conejo and Morelia Mayor Fausto Vallejo Figueroa of the PRI.
The PRI sought a victory in Michoacan to build momentum for regaining the presidency, which it lost to the PAN in 2000 after 71 years of single-party rule. The PRI so far is fielding the most popular pre-candidate in the presidential race, former Mexico state Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto.
"Whoever wins, their party will claim it helps for 2012, especially the current underdogs ? PAN and PRD," said Shannon O'Neil, a Latin America expert for the U.S.-based think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.
The once-dominant PRD trailed the other two major parties in the Michoacan governor's race, according to opinion polls. As Michoacan's governing party for a decade, the PRD drew criticism for the state's drug violence, and some of its legislative candidates were accused of having close ties to drug cartels.
More than 40,000 people have died in drug-related violence across Mexico during the federal government's five-year offensive, according to many estimates. Calderon's administration hasn't released official figures since nearly a year ago, when it counted 35,000.
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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
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