( Spanish) – The Fernando de los Ríos Cultural Center, a place that the Venezuelan Consulate in Madrid has enabled for Venezuelans in its constituency to vote in the presidential elections, opened its doors this Sunday after half past six in the morning, local time.
Hours before it opened, several dozen people were already waiting outside to be the first to vote. “I had to be here,” Iván Suarez, a 62-year-old native of Caracas, who arrived first after showing up at three in the morning, local time, told .
According to Suárez, he began the car trip to Madrid from Alicante, in the Valencian Community, this Saturday at 10 pm.
In addition to Madrid, the other four Venezuelan consulates in Spain, located in Vigo, Bilbao, Barcelona and Tenerife, were scheduled to open polling stations from the same time.
In total, 24,770 voters are called to participate from Spain in these elections. A figure that represents more than a third of all Venezuelans authorized to vote this Sunday from abroad, which reaches a total of 69,211 voters, according to the electoral registry.
To allow you to vote, 46 polling stations were assigned among the five consulates, of which 17 are located in Madrid.
Over the last few weeks, many Venezuelans residing in Spain have expressed their discomfort at having been excluded from the electoral roll of these presidential elections.
According to the most recent data from the National Institute of Statistics of Spain, as of January 2023, 518,918 people born in Venezuela reside in the country, of which 447,260 are over twenty years old.
The National Electoral Council of Venezuela enabled the period between last March 18 and April 16 so that whoever wished to do so and complied with the requirements established in the Organic Law of Electoral Processes, could register in the electoral registry.
The process in Spain began later than expected. In the case of Madrid, the consulate allowed registrations in the electoral registry as of March 27, nine days after the original deadline.
A situation that, as verified, triggered the discomfort of many of those who approached this diplomatic mission given that the registration was carried out slowly and only allowed the registration of a few people per day.
In addition, many others claimed that the requirements to materialize that registration were exclusive. This is because they were required to have proof of permanent residence in the country and several only had temporary residence.
In that sense, article 124 of the Venezuelan electoral law states that “only voters who have residency or any other regime that denotes legality of permanence outside Venezuela may vote abroad.”
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