Mexico has long been considered an epitome study in matters of electoral fraud. This article attempts to show how the struggle for democracy involved recovering control of the voting process and of electoral rituals. The ethnographic approach is applied to the internal elections of the Democratic Revolutionary Party. One can observe values and expectations conveyed by the transition to democracy, which has shaped the actors, the logic of the partisan game and the strategies for positioning themselves in a changing political market. These elections are a complex, multiform, contradictory phenomenon, situated at the point where new grassroots practices meet up with vote-catching gimmicks and a travesty of voting.