More than 2.47 million people voted by mail in Sunday’s legislative elections in Spain, a record in the country’s electoral history, according to official data released today.
Spain is voting for the first time this year in a general election at a time of summer holidays and high temperatures, which has prompted a record number of applications from voters to vote by mail.
Spanish legislation allows all registered voters in Spanish territory to vote by mail, something that more than 2.6 million voters asked to do, of which 94.2% (more than 2.4 million) handed in their vote at a Correios network station, the company announced today.
In these elections, 37,469,142 voters are invited to vote, to elect 350 deputies and 208 senators.
Until now, the record for postal votes was 1.4 million in the 2016 Spanish elections.
The volume of requests to vote by mail led the public company Correios this year to carry out an extraordinary increase in personnel without precedents by 21,000 people.
Last weekend, nearly 7,000 mail carriers delivered voting papers and thousands of post offices were open across the country.
In addition, during the week, post office hours were extended until 10:00 p.m. and were open even in places where there were municipal and regional holidays.
Voting by mail requires the voter to apply in advance, online or at a post office, and the voting papers must be delivered by hand.
The vote must then be delivered to a post office by the voter himself, whose identity is confirmed by a company employee.
The term to vote by mail ended on Friday at 2:00 p.m. and now, on Sunday, election day, Correos must deliver the votes received at the respective polling stations, which are 60,314 throughout the country.
14,000 people from Correos will be working for this, the company reported today.
Voting by mail has been at the center of debate and controversy since elections were called for July 23, unexpectedly, less than two months ago.
The leader of the Popular Party (PP, right), the largest force in the Spanish opposition and which is ahead in the polls, asked the postmen, in a campaign event, to “regardless of the bosses”, distribute the documentation to vote, even if they had to work “morning, afternoon and night”, and promised that he himself will pay them for overtime when he directs the Government, in the first Council of Ministers that he presides over.
These statements by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who in the past was president of the Correios administration, were criticized by other parties, by the unions and by the company’s management, which insisted on the reliability of the process, as is internationally recognized, and accused the PP leader of having adopted a “‘Trumpist’ strategy[numa referência ao ex-Presidente norte-americano Donald Trump]”, to eventually be able to question the results of the elections.
Feijóo ended up clarifying the next day that he did not intend to insinuate that there was an attempt at fraud or vote manipulation, but simply referred to a “congestion” in the Correios delivery service based on complaints from the unions.
Despite the clarification and given the volume of requests, voting by mail remained present and under permanent scrutiny in the debates, in the reports and in the campaign news.
Source: TSF
