“I have not been able to vote because someone took my registration without me knowing it. I have been very frustrated.” “The same thing has happened to me. I sold my apartment and they fired me without notifying me, leaving me without the right to vote”. “It turns out that if you register in a house, the City Council cancels the previous tenant through an uncertified letter.” It is the relief that during the last election day the presenter Terelu Campos, the drag star Nacha la Macha or the actress Aixa Villagrán expressed on their social networks. Testimonies to which were added those of other anonymous citizens who also affirmed that they had not voted. And not by choice.
The reason? They had been ‘erased’ ex officio from the register after changing their address. And, consequently, their names had come out of the electoral roll without having been aware of the situation, according to several testimonies collected by elDiario.es. Those affected affirm that they did not notice the wrongdoing until they appeared last Sunday at the polling station they had attended in previous elections and verified that they were not on any list, so they could not vote. “I am 44 years old and it is the first time in my life that I have not voted. I feel that my right has been taken away from me”, laments Villagrán.
The actress affirms that, due to her work, she changes her address very often, depending on where the filming takes place. That is why she did not unsubscribe from the last house where she had lived in the center of Madrid, where some friends now live. “I don’t have a fixed address. I have spent the last year in rental flats and tourist apartments”, she affirms. Her surprise and indignation were enormous when she went to the polling station and they told her that she was not registered in the census. “I called my friends and looking through my papers they saw that there was an uncertified letter from the Electoral Census Office in which they informed me that they had discharged me,” she details.
According to the local government law, all people living in Spain have the obligation to register in the census of the municipality in which they habitually reside and to “notify” the “variations” that affect that census. The legislation also empowers town halls to initiate a file for removal from the register if they discover that a person appears as registered in a property that is no longer their habitual residence. For example, if the new tenants or owners come to register and indicate that the previous occupants no longer reside there.
In any case, the ‘deregistration’ is not immediate. In this case, a procedure is opened in which the affected party must be notified of the breached requirement – not habitually residing at the address in question – and give them a “hearing” to say whether or not they agree and make the allegations they deem appropriate. within the established term, as established by the Regulation of Population and Territorial Demarcation of Local Entities. It is a regulated procedure although, in light of the testimonies collected, it has severe gaps. Mainly, in terms of how those affected are alerted.
This legal text indicates that there is the “possibility” of sending notifications to an electronic device and/or an email address identified by the interested party. In fact, the Common Administrative Procedure Law for Public Administrations establishes that notifications must be made “preferably” by electronic means. But the testimonies collected show that, in practice, this is not the case.
The opening of these files is communicated through letters sent by ordinary mail to the last address of which he is aware, with the difficulty that they end up reaching their recipients. When this notification has not been able to “practice”, the regulation determines that it must be done through an announcement published in the Official State Gazette.
After this last step, the file goes to the corresponding Provincial Section of the Registration Council —a collegiate body between the General State Administration and the autonomous regions—, which has the last word. If the decision is to discharge, the affected person is left out of any register. “It is not possible to register him in another municipality because by not answering it is unknown where he lives. Indeed, he is left without registering ”, confirms an INE spokesman.
The expulsion from the register implies deregistration from the census, something that is not communicated electronically either. In this case, a diptych similar to that of the census card is received at the last address where the person was registered, in which the deregistration is communicated and in which it is notified, again without acknowledgment of receipt, that “for to be a voter” it is necessary to have previously registered in the census.
Villagrán and the rest of those affected affirm that it does not make sense for the Administration not to carry out these communications electronically, through a security identification by SMS message or through a Permanent Code. “It seems that it does not interest that notification arrives,” laments Villagrán, who assures that after recounting his case on social networks, he received up to 70 messages from people who could not vote last Sunday for a similar reason. elDiario.es asked the INE the number of voters who had been removed from the census in the last year due to improper inclusion in the register, but a spokesperson stated that they do not have that information.
“It is a type of anachronistic and ineffective notification. Sending a piece of paper to an address where they already know you don’t live is absurd,” complains screenwriter Daniel Castro, who was unable to vote last Sunday either. In his case, he had moved with his family a few months ago in the Chamberí neighborhood in Madrid. He acknowledges that “through carelessness” he did not modify his register, although he never thought that they could unsubscribe him without notifying him. “We stood at the polling station in the middle of a storm and queued up at several tables until we saw that we weren’t on any of them,” he recounts.
Then, together with his family, he went to the provincial office of the Electoral Census Office and there they informed him that as of February they had been removed from the electoral roll and that they did not appear anywhere in Madrid. “It has hurt me a lot, I had never missed an election. We are talking about losing a fundamental right, it is not proportionate with respect to the offense committed, if you can call it that. I believe that the procedure should be more rigorous and guarantee. The Administration has all my data, I use the digital certificate. Why was it not communicated to me that way? ”, He wonders.
Antonio Delgado, a resident of Leganés (Madrid), tells a similar story. He changed his address in December of last year and delayed the change in the register, precisely thinking that this way he would avoid problems to be able to vote in May. He assumed that he was still on the census, but when he went to the electoral college of the Vallecas district in which he had voted on other occasions, his name did not appear anywhere. He also approached the Electoral Census Office and was told that he had been removed from the electoral roll on March 13. “They were counting and they told me that there were 400 people in the same situation and it was only 12 in the morning. He didn’t understand anything. There should be some mechanism to be able to vote in these cases, a provisional register or something like that”, he affirms.
Delgado assures that it is also the first time that he has not voted. Now, like the rest of those affected with whom elDiario.es has spoken, he will try to claim so as not to also be robbed of exercising his right in the general elections on July 23. But it seems very complicated. The current electoral census for these elections is the one that closed on March 1 with the variations communicated by the city councils and consulates with registration dates in their records prior to February 28, as confirmed by a spokesperson for the National Institute of Statistics (INE). .
