The National Electoral Institute (Spanish: Instituto Nacional Electoral; INE), formerly the Federal Electoral Institute (Spanish: Instituto Federal Electoral; IFE), is an autonomous, public agency responsible for organizing federal elections in Mexico: that is, those related to the election of the President of the United Mexican States, the members of the Congress of the Union as well as elections of authorities and representatives at local and state levels. The agency's president is Guadalupe Taddei Zavala [es], appointed in 2023 for a nine-year term.

In 1917, with the promulgation of the Constitution of Mexico, the Junta Empadronadora, the local Computing Councils and the Electoral Colleges were placed in charge of organizing and supervising the election of the president, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Senate. This meant municipal presidents were granted a great deal of control over the election process, due to the location and amount of polling station within their municipalities.

The Federal Electoral Viligance Commission (Comisión Federal de Vigilancia Electoral, CFVE), Mexico's first formal electoral body, was established with the Federal Electoral Law on January 7, 1946, as a dependent agency of the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB). The CFVE was led by the Secretary of the Interior, an additional cabinet member, a federal deputy, a senator, and two representatives from the largest political parties. President Manuel Ávila Camacho, the artificer of the new agency, transferred the responsibility of electoral vigilance to the office of the president, arguing that municipalities were unable to perform that function due to "party influence".

The new Electoral Law also established the Council of the Electoral Roll and Local Electoral Commissions, as well as declaring independent candidacies illegal, granting political parties exclusivity during electoral processes.

In 1951, the attributions of the CFVE as an electoral authority were expanded. Some of its new responsibilities included emitting majority certificates to recognize winning candidates and intervention in the process to create new political parties.

In 1973, the CFVE was abolished and replaced by the Federal Electoral Commission [es] (Comisión Federal Electoral). Its governing organ introduced representatives from all legally registered political parties, who had voice and vote for the proceedings.

In the 1976 Mexican general election, José López Portillo participated as the sole candidate for the presidency. Once he was president, he enacted the 1977 1977 political reforms, which created the Law for Political Organizations and Electoral Proceedings (LOPPE). This law modified the government organ of the Electoral Commission, to include representatives from all parties, including those under a "conditional registry". The figure of conditional registry consisted of a four-year probation period for new political parties, during which they needed to demonstrate their subsistence. This figure was eliminated in 1984. Since the reform made it easier to register new political parties and granted effective representation in the Electoral Commission to existing parties, it was generally considered a progressive reform.

At the end of the 1980s, opposition parties consolidated themselves as a serious threat to the hegemony of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). This led to the 1987 electoral reform, which established a proportional representation system in the Electoral Commission's government body, giving PRI a majority of the political party representatives. Because of this, the reform was generally considered regressive.