Postal controls on voting by mail neutralize Feijóo’s suspicions

The location of the elections at the end of July, in the middle of the summer holidays, has triggered the requests for voting by mail in Spain. The administration has registered more than 2.3 million requests one day before the end of the deadline to request remote voting, which means doubling the figures of the last general elections held in 2019. Once the documentation is received, it can be deposited up to on July 20 at the offices of the public company.

The procedure requires new requirements after in the last municipal and regional elections in May several open investigations into alleged fraud in voting by mail, especially in Melilla, led the Central Electoral Board to reinforce controls. Last June, it established that all the people who have requested the vote by mail for the general elections will have to present the DNI not only when issuing the request, but also when the envelope with the ballots is deposited in the offices of the public company.

This decision meant extending to the entire national territory the measure established on May 28 in Melilla as a result of suspicions of a possible fraud that is still being investigated today by a court in the autonomous city. In the event that a person justifies that they cannot go in person with their DNI in hand, they can authorize someone else to do so, but with a photocopy of their National Identity Document.

The unions of the public company have been demanding more reinforcements of personnel, given that the elections coincide with summer vacations for part of the personnel. Regino Martín, general secretary of Comisiones Obreras in Madrid, accused during an interview on Telemadrid the company’s management of “taking the piss” of the citizens and of not hiring enough reinforcements to respond to the challenge set by the public company and calculated that 2.5 million people will have requested to vote remotely. In that interview, the union representative ended up implying that it is the government that does not want people to vote.

The PP clings to these statements by the union to amplify its suspicions about the Government. As a result of Feijóo’s statements, the company that he himself chaired between 2000 and 2003 with the second Aznar government has recalled that since May 30 it has taken “all the necessary measures to guarantee voting by mail.” Among other the 19,400 reinforcement contracts that it has carried out for “the correct development of the activities related to voting by mail for the General Elections that will be held on July 23”, he explained. CCOO, extols the PP, it has been denounced that these contracts have not taken place.

In his statements, Feijóo has launched the same strategy deployed by himself in 2005 to question the cleanliness of the elections, reports Aitor Riveiro. That year, when he was a candidate for the Xunta de Galicia on the list headed by Manuel Fraga, he demanded that the PSOE central executive guard the foreign vote sacks when they arrived in Madrid.

Feijóo, expert in questioning the elections

Feijóo’s record encouraging hoaxes to question the cleanliness of the elections in Spain goes back to 2005. Just a few years after leaving the presidency of the company, and in the middle of an electoral campaign to win the Xunta de Galicia, the current leader of the Through its team, the PP asked the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to guard the foreign vote sacks upon arrival at the Barajas airport.

The strategy of questioning the cleanliness of the elections to the point of encouraging a theory that questions the results grew strongly at the hands of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the US and Brazil, respectively, and has also been adopted by the right and the extreme right in Spain in the last electoral appointments.

Voting by mail has, first of all, double control: when the ballot is requested and when it is received at home. Impersonating someone to vote is not, therefore, so simple, with the added risk that the person holding that vote goes to the polling station and the fraud is uncovered. Questioning the custody of these votes by the Post Office is also a complicated task: the envelopes are sent to the delivery unit attached to the corresponding electoral college, where they are deposited and kept in safe deposit boxes until their subsequent delivery on the day of the elections in the corresponding polling stations, informs Elena Herrera.

It is also recurrent to question the recount because, according to certain far-right agitators, companies like Indra intervene in the recount process, which is not true. The recount is the task of the citizens who are part of the polling stations: the companies limit themselves to transferring the results to a publicly accessible web page.

——————————

our voice is needed

Without an independent press, they will not be able to resist democratic rights and freedoms and that is why elDiario.es has become a very uncomfortable medium, which some would like to keep quiet about. We are one of the few reference newspapers that remains free, that does not whitewash the ultras or is captured by the right. You, who read us regularly, know it well. Can you imagine what journalism would be like in Spain if elDiario.es did not exist? What would public debate be like without our voice? Can you imagine what Spain we would have?

If you’re worried about what might happen in this country, support us. Today we need you more than ever. Become a member, become a member, of elDiario.es.