MEXICO'S three-month election campaign came to an end yesterday, ahead of polling day on July 1st. For the next few days candidates are banned from further campaigning. The welcome break from their slogans will be marred only by the ley seca, or “dry law”, which bans the sale of alcohol over the weekend in order to limit the chance of drunken arguments over the fine details of fiscal reform.

Along with the suspension of campaigning, the last days before the election see a ban on opinion polls, so the ones published yesterday are the last we will see before the results are announced. They showed little change from most surveys done over the past month: Enrique Peña Nieto was in the lead with around 38%, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was on about 24% and Josefina Vázquez Mota was next with 20% or so. Gabriel Quadri had about 2%. The remainder, about one in six voters, had yet to make up their minds.

Some backers of the trailing candidates have criticised the surveys as being inaccurate or deliberately skewed in favour of Mr Peña. A joke doing the rounds on Twitter says that a Mexican polling company carried out a survey on who would win the European football championship. The results were: Germany 14%, Spain 24%, Enrique Peña Nieto 677%.

Pollsters sometimes do get it badly wrong. In Britain's general election in 2010, for instance, most companies overestimated support for the Liberal Democrats, who had been predicted to win as much as 30% and ended up seven percentage points lower. A recent article in Nexos magazine highlighted instances in Mexico where polls have been inaccurate (although it referred to contests for governor, which are harder to measure than presidential ones). So it may be that we wake up on July 2nd to a big surprise.

Maybe. But let's say the election goes roughly the way that the polls have predicted, which seems likely. A worry voiced by many people is that those who have been saying that the surveys are fraudulent will be tempted to apply the same reasoning to the election itself. Mr López Obrador's aides have been briefing for months that the surveys are a fiction, and that in reality their candidate is heading for victory. Many people in Mexico believe this (including some Economist readers, if online comments are anything to go by), though the evidence is weak.

Mr López Obrador has said publicly that he will respect the result, and that there will be no repeat of the fiasco caused by his protests in 2006. Hopefully that will be the case, whoever wins.