48 i) The existence of an essential social need – essential public interest 187. The State argued that the system of nomination for public office by political parties responded to various social needs. First, it responded to a historical and political necessity; that of creating and strengthening a system of political parties where such a system did not exist and where, to the contrary, there had been a hegemonic party or official State party regime. In that respect, the State argued that from 1917 to 1946, independent candidacies were permitted by law. The Electoral Act published on January 7, 1946, established that only the political parties could register candidates, excluding the possibility of citizens aspiring to be elected to public office independently of the political parties at the federal level. Shortly after the publication of this law, the Mexican Party of the Revolution (PRM) was transformed and gave rise to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and “[f]or decades, PRI was the party that played a dominant role in the State’s political structure.” The “minimal party system at that time became a model [defined] as the ‘hegemonic party system.’” Consequently, the subsequent constitutional reforms were aimed at “opening up the party system to all the political options that the political plurality of a society requires,” and neither the 1977 reform nor the subsequent reforms incorporated the mechanism of independent candidacies at the federal level, because “the principal objective of all the reforms was, first, to build up a party system where there had been none and, second, to strengthen this party system. These reforms were elaborated based on the premise that “democracy cannot exist without an open, representative, plural, equitable and competitive party system. This is why a mixed system of party financing was created, although with a predominantly public component, which has provided the political parties with important resources to bring about equity in the electoral processes.” 188. The State also indicated that its system of registering candidacies also responds to the need to organize an electoral process in a society of 75 million voters, in which independent candidacies could “[…] promote the multiplication of those who aspire to public office, so that the popular representation would be fragmented and it could reach a level where the electoral process would be inoperative, owing to the complications that could arise at its different stages.” 189. Lastly, according to the State, the need for the system in force is also related to the predominantly public system of financing the Mexican electoral system. This financing model has three purposes: first, to create conditions of equity in the political campaign; second, to introduce transparency in the resources provided to the electoral campaigns by ensuring the certainty of the origin of most of the money used and, third, to prevent private, lawful or unlawful interests influencing the political campaign. In this regard, the State argued that independent candidacies: (i) would make it difficult to monitor financing, which could lead to private interests predominating over the public interest and even to the possibility of unlawful activities related to certain challenges “facing the country, particularly those relating to large-scale organized crime”; (ii) could lead to the distribution of public funds becoming a system that was impossible to finance, given the predominantly public funding of candidates, with the consequent and evident inequality among the candidates postulated by the political parties and those that eventually run for office independently, and (iii) would establish a system that was very complicated to administer in terms of equality in electoral processes; “it is evident that financial capacity is needed to develop an independent candidacy and recruit voters, which implies inequality as regards those that do not have this capacity.” The introduction of independent candidacies would entail a radical change in the electoral system, which has been conducted successfully over the past decade. 190. The representatives argued the need for independent candidates for the following reasons, among others: only a very small percentage of the population was interested in taking part in a party organization; the limited credibility of the political parties and the