MEXICO CITY - Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador toured the protest camps his supporters have set up in Mexico City's center on Tuesday, urging them to ignore public criticism as he presses for a vote-by-vote recount in a presidential election he says he rightfully won.

The candidate appeared to win a small victory the night before, when the Federal Electoral Tribunal's seven judges voted unanimously in a late session to consider a possible recount while also ruling on each of the hundreds of challenges in individual districts.

López Obrador, who stepped down as Mexico City's mayor to run for president, has alleged that widespread fraud and accumulated tallying errors tainted the election and led to conservative Felipe Calderón's 0.6 percent advantage in an official count of the July 2 vote.

But the tribunal also dealt an apparent blow to López Obrador's ''shotgun'' strategy of citing thousands of irregularities at the 130,000 polling places, saying it would not roll all the legal challenges into a single case and each complaint would be considered on its own merits.

On Tuesday, the ramshackle camps of tents, tarps, lawn chairs and improvised barricades snarled commuter traffic in the capital for a second straight day, and television news focused on motorists' anger as they endured hours-long commutes.

Mexico's financial center along the normally bustling Reforma boulevard was eerily silent for the absence of cars.

And the silver-haired presidential candidate said the protests were just the start of a campaign of sustained ''civil resistance'' against alleged electoral fraud.

López Obrador did not announce any new civil disobedience measures, instead receiving hugs and cheers from followers camped out on Reforma. As he passed, they chanted, ''Here comes the president!'' and ``The people are with you!''

''We are not going to turn to violence,'' López Obrador told the crowd. ``Neither surrender, nor violence.''

On Sunday, the candidate called for the round-the-clock protests at a rally of a half-million supporters, but only a few thousand -- many of them members or officials of his Democratic Revolution Party -- have shown up to sleep in tents or man the often sparsely populated protest camps.

Stretches of large, circus-style tarps covered much of the city's main boulevard, but beneath them were only smatterings of pup tents.

While organizers had hoped to make the protest ''a festival of popular culture,'' the camps boasted only a few pieces of artwork, lone performers, recorded music and impromptu soccer games.