The General Council of Mexico's National Electoral Institute (INE) approved by a majority vote the guidelines for preparing and developing district-level computations for the 2026-2027 federal elections. ^[1] Guadalupe Taddei, the president councilor, supported detecting irregularities but joined Frida Gómez's proposal to identify ballots as 'computable or non-computable' to avoid exceeding the INE's authority to annul votes. ^[2] In the 2025 judicial election, 800 polling stations nationwide were considered invalid due to ironed ballots, primarily in municipalities in the State of Chiapas which represented over 20% of installed voting tables in that entity. ^[3] Several councilors argued the INE cannot invent causes for ballot invalidity that are not explicitly stated in the law. ^[4] The National Electoral Institute (INE) modified guidelines for district council counts to separate and identify ballots without creases, presuming they did not enter the ballot box as a citizen's vote. ^[5] Council member Uuc-kib Espadas argued that the lack of fold marks is an unequivocal sign of electoral fraud because the ballot dimensions make it physically impossible to insert them without folding. ^[6] The approved mechanism allows district councils to document flat ballots-those appearing in urns without fold marks-via an incident report and decide in a plenary session whether to compute them. ^[7] The proposal was approved with seven votes in favor and four against, after the original project and an alternative proposal by Rita Bell López López were rejected. ^[8]