But that massive voting bloc never developed. It turned out only about 4.2 million Mexicans living abroad are eligible to vote and of those only 41,000 - 1 percent - even registered. How many will actually cast ballots in the July 2 election remains to be seen.

Despite that trickle, experts are calling the result a significant start, given the Mexican government's historic wariness of its citizens living outside the country.

''You have to take into account how sensitive this was in Mexico. There is virtually no other country in the world that has so many citizens living abroad, and even a small percentage could affect the election,'' said Gabriel Escobar, associate director for the Washington, D.C.,-based Pew Hispanic Center.

''It is an incredibly remarkable thing that it happened. It didn't draw as many voters, but it's there,'' he said.

Escobar noted that before President Vicente Fox and his National Action Party (PAN) won the 2000 election, the Mexican government had a tense and even combative relationship with Mexicans living abroad, many of whom opposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. This time, the PRI's candidate is not even among the top two. Next month, left-leaning Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), faces off against the PAN's Felipe Calderon.

The small number of Mexicans living abroad who registered to vote is due to a variety of reasons, but the government's strict prohibition on candidates campaigning abroad, limited funding and regulations discouraging local consulates from promoting the vote meant getting the word out was no easy task.

That was true especially in the South, where the number of immigrants has nearly doubled in the last decade but where Mexican community groups and Spanish-language media - often the main source of information for these immigrants - still lag behind areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and Phoenix. In Florida, the Spanish language media often focus as much on Cuba and other Latin American countries as it does on Mexico.

When it came time to register, Florida City resident Araceli Rodriguez was at a loss for where to get information until her teenage son found the necessary forms on the Internet.

''I like to vote, so I looked for the information,'' said the housekeeper and mother of seven, who mailed in her certified ballot well before the July 1 deadline. ''That is not the case with most people. They are thinking about work. They don't know where to go.''

Apathy was also high among many Mexicans who grew up watching the PRI maintain its tight grasp on power decade after decade. And with proposed changes in immigration law before Congress, many were more focused on improving their situation in the United States than on politics back home.

But most of all, Mexicans who left before the mid-1990s were unlikely to possess the required credential needed to register and would have had to return to Mexico to get one.

America Gruner of Dalton, Ga., said she didn't have the money and couldn't take the time away from her job as a health promoter to return to Mexico for her card.

Homestead resident Jose Delgado was afraid to return home because he came to the United States illegally.

''It would be good to vote because as a Mexican, one wants things to be better,'' the Guerrero, Mexican said but added that increased border patrols made him fearful he might not be able to get back.

In eight Southern states, excluding Texas, the number of Mexican immigrants jumped from about 98,000 in 1990 to an estimated 900,000 in 2005, according to the Pew Center's review of U.S. Census data.

Yet several experts said they expected voter turnout in the South to be lower proportionally than in the West because the population is not as well established. They said newer immigrants were more likely to fear being flagged by immigration authorities and less likely to have a fixed address in the U.S. - even if they had their voter credential.

''There's more of a history in California and Chicago. Politics are already there. You have people running for posts back home in Mexico,'' said Juvencio Rocha Peralta, who heads the Mexican Association of North Carolina. ''Here we're just a few different people.''

But according to the IFE, those who signed up to vote from the Southeast was proportional to the percentage living in the region.

Just over 3 percent of those who registered to vote were from Florida, home to 2.3 percent of Mexican immigrants, and 2 percent of those registered came from North Carolina, home to about the same percentage of Mexican immigrants. That compared to 38 percent of registered voters who hailed from California, where nearly the same percentage of the country's Mexican immigrants live, according to 2004 Census data.

The Pew's Escobar said the real sign will be how many of those registered actually vote.

The number of expatriate voters will never be huge, Escobar said, ''but everything indicates the longer you do this, the more you'll get.''

''This is an experiment in Mexico," he said. ''It's important because any increase is significant when there are 10 million people who could potentially vote.''