In a Spain on vacation, voting by mail becomes popular and creates concern

The legislative elections in Spain on Sunday will take place over the summer holidays, prompting more than two million people to vote for maila high figure that fueled fears of manipulation, exploited by the right and the extreme right.

The 2.6 million people who requested to vote by mail have until Thursday to deposit the ballot at a postal service office.

make up a 6.9% of the total of 37.7 million voters, a percentage never seen before in this country where voting is not compulsory.

But since the election campaign began, the opposition has cast doubt on the Post Office’s ability 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”affirmed last week the 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 media” necessary. That joins “the bad intention of calling elections in the vacation period of the Spaniards”he added.

“Smear”

In the last few weeks, voting by mail has generated numerous false news that the date of the election had been chosen to organize a “electoral fraud” for the benefit of the left.

“There is no precedent” in Spain of national elections in the summer, points out Giselle García Hípola, a political scientist at the University of Granada, for whom this has led to misinformation.

misinformation “it tends to be widely disseminated” when the voter “He is not very knowledgeable about how it works” of the process, says the expert.

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 do not go to vote, or that they effectively distrust the electoral process.”

The postal service rejected in a statement “all those insinuations or information that have called into question the work of Correos 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 the 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.

He stayed waiting for the ballot, which never arrived, and since the deadline is over, he is left without voting. “stupid”says.

Cristina García Loygorri, a 48-year-old from Madrid, says, on the contrary, that she has found the process “easy”. In any case, he says that he would have preferred to vote in person and wonders: “Is it true that my vote is going to go there inside the ballot box?”

“dangerous” strategy

For Astrid Barrio, professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the main “risk” it is whether there is a big difference between the people who have applied to vote by mail and the people who have actually successfully completed the process.

This could “be interpreted by some and others in a tendentious way (…) as a mechanism for electoral manipulation,” says Barrio.

International observers give a lot of credit to the Spanish electoral system and the vote-by-mail mechanism, 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 fall into a strategy “dangerous”warns García Hípola. “When you doubt a public entity, you doubt forever, no matter the political color” who is in power, 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.

Source: AFP