Madrid – The legislative elections in Spain on Sunday will take place during the summer holidays (boreal), which led more than two million people to vote by mail, a high number that fueled fears of manipulation, exploited by the right and the extreme right .
Some 2.6 million people requested to vote by mail, 6.9% of the total of 37.7 million voters, an unprecedented figure in this country where participating in the elections is not mandatory.
The interest has been such that the Electoral Board decided yesterday, the deadline date, “to extend the term for the delivery by the voters of the voting envelopes in the Post Offices until Friday” (for today), to “facilitate as much as possible the right of suffrage of the citizens”.
Since the campaign began, the opposition has cast doubt on the ability of the postal service to meet the high demand, hinting that ballots could be left uncounted.
“I ask the postmen of Spain to work to the maximum, morning, afternoon and night and, even if they do not have enough reinforcements, to know that they are guarding something that is sacred to the Spanish, which is their vote,” the president said last week. leader of the Popular Party (PP, conservatives), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, favorite in the polls.
The head of the far-right formation Vox, Santiago Abascal, said on Tuesday that he was “extraordinarily concerned”, since in his opinion the postal service has not had the necessary “means”. This is added to “the bad intention of calling elections in the vacation period of the Spaniards,” he added.
In recent weeks, postal voting has generated numerous fake news stories claiming that the election date had been chosen to organize “electoral fraud” for the benefit of the left.
“There is no precedent” in Spain for national elections in the summer, said Giselle García Hípola, a political scientist at the University of Granada, for whom this has led to misinformation.
In response to the opposition, the president of the government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, denounced “a strategy of muddying up and a strategy of trying to create disaffection so that people
not go to vote, or that he actually mistrusts the electoral process.”
The postal service rejected in a statement “all those insinuations or information that have called into question the work of Post Office professionals” that “weaken our democracy.”
Without previous experience, some voters say they have had difficulties, like Enriqueta González.
“The same day it was announced on TV, I requested to vote” by mail, says the 51-year-old real estate agent, who did not understand that she would later have to prove her identity at a Post Office. She stayed waiting for the ballot, which never arrived, and since the deadline is now over, she was left without voting. “Stupid,” she says.
Cristina García Loygorri, a 48-year-old from Madrid, says, on the contrary, that she has found the process “easy”. In any case, she says that she would have preferred to vote in person and wonders: “Is it true that my vote is going to go inside” the ballot box?
For Astrid Barrio, professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the main “risk” is if there is a big difference between the people who have applied to vote by mail and the people who have successfully completed the process.
This could “be interpreted by some and others in a tendentious way as a mechanism for electoral manipulation,” says Barrio.
The Spanish electoral system and the voting-by-mail mechanism are internationally considered “as one of the most solid and reliable that exists and as one of the least manipulable,” says Joan Botella, a political scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
By sowing doubts, the parties are committing a “dangerous” strategy, warns García Hípola. “When you doubt a public entity, you doubt forever, no matter the political color” that governs, he says.
“This is a typical strategy of populism and we are seeing it all over the world, not only in Spain,” he adds, referring to the accusations of fraud launched by the American Donald Trump or the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro after their defeats.
AFP Agency
Source: Ambito
