The Popular Party has embraced one of the most common strategies of the extreme right to delegitimize the government to unseat: question the Spanish electoral system. The conservatives have revived the suspicions they already launched in 2023 on the postal vote system in the last general elections, after they have transcended the Leire Díez maneuvers and the audios in which Santos Cerdán gave orders to Koldo García for the 2014 PSOE primaries. “The system is not complete Suspicions, with the safety systems reinforced for two years and without explaining whether he lived something similar when he was president of Correos for three years. Feijóo has even requested a “working group” of which they have no knowledge in the Electoral Board. “There are none,” they explain from this organism.
Putting the results in question is one of the head of political leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Doubts spread them massively without evidence in a preventive way before elections or when they do not win elections. But they are theories that dissipate when they win and govern as has been the case of the latest US elections. Once in the government they do not usually open research and the evidence of these supposed mass electoral frauds never appear.
The right and the extreme right in Spain are not alien to this trend. Rodrigo Rato questioned the electoral census in 1993 hours before the victory of the PSOE of Felipe González and Santiago Abascal and Vox question the vote system by mail in any choice that they have presented in the last decade. The Popular Party climbed into this wave in 2023, when Feijóo premiered as the national party of the party asking the porteros to deliver all the ballots despite “their bosses.”
The dialectical funambulism of the PP on this matter – halfway between questioning the vote system by mail, but only in the elections in which they have not managed to form a government – has returned two years later to the heat of the revelations about Leire Díez and the Koldo case. The already socialist former militant, expelled by her maneuvers to obtain compromising information of controls of the Central Operational Unit, held different positions in the state company between 2021 and 2024, a relationship that has led the PP to question the results of the general elections of 2023 retroactively.
The exit gun was given by José María Aznar in an interview in The world This weekend. The former president of the Government mentioned the presence of Díez in Correos and also the audios in which Santos Cerdán orders Koldo García to manipulate two ballots in the PSOE primaries of 2014 won Pedro Sánchez. “When you are able to adulterate elections in your party, why will you not be able to alter general elections?” Aznar wondered.
The current PP has collected the glove, and Feijóo assured the following in the program of Federico Jiménez Losantos: “If one has stolen a jewelry store, why a bank cannot steal.” Halfway between questioning the vote by mail of the last general elections, but also affirming not having “doubts about post officials,” Feijóo asked the Electoral Board to “supervise” the entire process and that, in practice, review those electoral results, in the line of What is requested by Vox. The Central Electoral Board has already rejected a few days ago the request of the Santiago Abascal party in that regard: if they have suspicions about electoral fraud, where you have to go to the Prosecutor's Office and the criminal courts.
The suspicions and theories of the conspiracy launched by PP and Vox collide with the same wall against which they crashed in 2023: internal controls in emails and in the electoral system, reinforced precisely two years ago, make it difficult for a large -scale vote manipulation to alter an electoral result. Documented cases or under investigation in Spain place the time of vote corruption in favor of a party, in any case, before the ballots arrive at the hands of emails.
Security reinforcements in 2023
The vote by mail in Spain starts with the voters by sending their ballots to the administration through the post office, where they are guarded until the day of the elections. These ballots are delivered at the electoral tables corresponding to nine in the morning, the time at which the polls are opened and after the closure of the electoral schools are mixed with the face -to -face ballots after verifying that the voters are registered in the census and that they are not voting twice. If the documentation fails, the ballot stays out of the urn.
Several judicial fronts put the 2023 elections under the focus without any court, not even the constitutional, appreciated anything like a suspicion. The arrests of several coalition politicians by Melilla (CPM) and people linked to the party and the opening of judicial causes in locations such as mojácar with accused of buying votes for PSOE and also PP led the central electoral board to raise the security bar.
Feijóo disguised his doubts about the cleaning of the electoral process in his first confrontation with Pedro Sánchez at the polls. After asking the porteros to distribute all the ballots despite “their bosses”, the PP cited those insinuations to the complaints of a personnel lack of personnel. In those elections, Correos ended up hiring 20,000 reinforcements to ensure the transparency of these elections. And the regulations changed to make sure that the person who carried the vote was, indeed, who voted.
The change began by Melilla after some political leaders were involved in a corrupt vote purchase plot by mail. There, the Zone Electoral Board chose to demand that whoever was vote by mail had to identify when taking his ballot to Correos. The envelopes deposited in mailboxes were not valid and the votes delivered once the deadline would be taken to the Electoral Board and not to the table. “Given these facts, and to avoid any questions that may arise about the regularity of the vote procedure by mail,” said the Electoral Board shortly after, that doctrine was extended to the whole country: whoever wants to vote by mail has to identify himself by showing the ID, the passport, the driving card or the residence card.
Feijóo, Expressive of Correos
That new filter, together with all existing ones in a previous way and the operation of the vote system by mail, limits according to sources of the Electoral Board the possibilities that there is some type of fraud and reaches the polls. “It would be necessary to corrupt emails to deliver boxes with false votes, but also who then receives them in the electoral administration,” these sources explain to eldiario.es. In the cases that have been registered and sentenced in Spain, such as the one that took Mustafa Aberchán to the bench in Melilla, the fraud is perpetrated before reaching Correos: buying the will of the voter to put a certain ballot.
Part of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's speech is based on remembering that the PSOE, in those 2023 elections, already went to the Constitutional seeking the revision of 30,000 votes in Madrid to get a key seat. The one that allowed Pedro Sánchez to depend on the abstention and not on the vote in favor of Junts. “In the last elections the PSOE arrived at the Constitutional questioning the last seat that corresponded to the PP,” said the PP leader.
That appeal of the PSOE, which was rejected flat by the Court of Guarantees, gave rise to a sentence that established that the result of an election cannot be questioned without evidence and that the counts and reviews such as those now asks for Feijóo cannot only be urged by suspicions when, as in the case of 2023, there is no indication of electoral fraud. “The review of all null votes, without at least indications of irregularities in the electoral procedure, is disproportion,” said the constitutional.
“Who had the ballots? They were in Correos. The fair thing is that the Electoral Board has it,” he added, to sow the doubt about the role of the public company in a process that, he adds, “is not armored.” The PP leader does not explain what it refers to, taking into account that he was president of Correos from 2000 to 2003, a stage in which there were no general elections, but, for example, Galician elections in which Manuel Fraga's PP razed and in which more than 19,000 people voted by mail through the public company he presided.
Feijóo never questioned the electoral system when he was in charge of Correos, but it took just two years to do it after leaving the public company. In 2005, when he headed The PP list by Pontevedrahe demanded that the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that will guard the bags of the outer vote when they arrive in Madrid. On that occasion too He went to the Electoral Boardgetting only to keep the null votes for “caution.” The PP gave up on that resource When he found that the votes likely to review were not served to recover the absolute majority.
Twenty years later, the PP leader has also wielded a fact that is impossible to verify: that in the 2023 generals the PSOE improved its results in Madrid thanks to the vote by mail because it took “many” votes with respect to the regional ones of that same year in the region. The vote by mail is mixed with face -to -face ballots and it is not possible to know their incidence, regardless of the possibility that the same person votes different things in two different choices.
