In the 2022 regional elections in Sicily, many seats were assigned by the skin of their teeth, but there is a real mystery underway regarding the assignment of one of these. An exciting mystery too, since at stake is not the simple assignment of a seat, but the key principle of representative democracy. Which might seem trivial but apparently it isn’t: whoever gets the most votes gets elected.
In the Catania constituency, the Five Star Movement won two seats. The second initially seemed to go to Lidia Adorno, historic ex-city councilor of Catania and first candidate for mayor of the grillini in its infancy. Just a few votes away was Martina Ardizzone, also a former Grillina municipal councilor in Paternò, where however at the last municipal elections the M5S had chosen to make a civic list allied among others with Totò Cuffaro’s men. A legitimate decision which, however, was “punished” by the voters who had left Ardizzone and the other Five Star candidates at home, below the 5% threshold.
Two leading women, therefore, of the Sicilian pentastellati. The family challenge at the end of the regional election seemed to have been won by Adorno from Catania, but the first official data overturned the unofficial ones, because “right in Paternò – explains a source to TPI – several more votes suddenly appeared for Ardizzone”. And in the end, not surprisingly, the latter was elected: 1849 valid votes against 1841 for her competitor Adorno.
At the photo finish
And this is where the beauty comes. Given the small distance, Adorno herself proposes an appeal within the expected time frame, requesting and obtaining access to the documents of the 58 municipalities of the province, in order to be able to add the official data of the 1126 electoral sections. Adorno’s request is in fact to make a simple addition from the data provided by the 1126 sections. “I filed an appeal not because I want to sit on the ARS to the detriment of someone else, but because I believe in democracy and its sacred rules,” the excluded woman tells TPI. And she explains: «I have enormous respect for my colleague Ardizzone, and I am sure that she is doing well in the Region, unlike Schifani and her majority. The problem is only to be certain which candidate was chosen by the Catania voters, which one received the most votes.”
It must be said that the TAR has already pronounced itself recognizing the legitimacy of Ardizzone’s election. But something would not add up enough to push Adorno to turn to the Council of Administrative Justice (a body which in Sicily has the same functions as the Council of State, ed.). The doubt, starting from a preliminary work by the lawyers of the pentastellata excluded from the Ars, is apparently legitimate: «The enormous and fruitful work of my lawyers has given us the possibility of making an algebraic sum of the individual sections, which – once the official reports have been obtained – even a child could do it in a few minutes with the calculator on his mobile phone. According to that sum, I was chosen by 1859 citizens, and my colleague by 1849. My appeal asks only this: do the sum, count the votes, verify, take care scrupulously that it is proven without a shadow of a doubt who democratically has right to sit in the Palace of Orleans. Maybe we made a mistake in doing the calculations, although we have repeated the operation a thousand times, it could be true. However, democracy, the free choice of voters, cannot be trampled upon without there being any certainty of how they actually chose. I still have enormous difficulty understanding how the electoral office was able to proclaim a result that is different from that of the individual sections, so I only ask you to understand what happened, to make a quick addition so that I can continue to work peacefully, knowing that democracy in Italy is not violated.”
In slow motion
The strangeness of this story, in fact, is not the very short distance that separates two candidates, but precisely the lack of clarity regarding who received the most votes. Yet the formal “mechanism” is quite clear: at the end of each election, the President of the section draws up two minutes, which are identical by law: one is deposited with the Municipalities – who promptly provided the appellants with that report with the data of all the individual sections and from which, in fact, the calculation error would emerge – the other to the Central District Office of the Court of Catania. And it is precisely this Office that was initially asked for the documentation, but this access to the documents was responded to with the mere delivery of only the proclamation report and not with the lists of all the votes.
Martina Ardizzone herself, current 5S councilor in the Region, contacted by telephone by TPI, is clear on one point: «If Lidia (Adorno, ed.) thinks there are errors, it is right that she also appealed to the Council of Justice at second instance Administrative (body which in Sicily has the same functions as the Council of State, ed.) so we are now awaiting the decision. From what I know, the TAR was clear and left no openings, but let’s see. It is obvious that if you are right, you have every right to take over in my place, I want to be clear about this.”
Adorno’s request, which apparently has never been given a clear or convincing answer, is to appoint a so-called “evaluator”, a sort of CTU who can normally be appointed by the TAR or, now, also by the Administrative Justice Council which, without costs to the community but borne by the appellant or the losing party, should perform a simple arithmetic sum of the preferences of the two candidates (one for Adorno and one for Ardizzone), extrapolating the data from the minutes attached to the appeal, without having to repeat the electoral operations, without having to open any ballot.
Therefore, the great unknown remains: why, according to the appellant, does the sum of the sections not correspond to the numbers relating to the proclamation of those elected? Is there an error in the sum, a wrong addition by the district electoral office, or is the error made by the appellant? So all that remains is to really hope that the judges want to take the trouble to waste five minutes to check the votes and verify who really received the trust of the citizens of Etna. Otherwise it would be yet another prank in the land of pranks. It is yet another demonstration of Italian inadequacy, when in the rest of European countries hand-written minutes, column additions, difficult to read figures and corrections with pelikan eraser have long been put aside, but systems are used unfalsifiable computer scientists and a few hours before the elections we know that they have been elected and rejected. Without the need for stamped papers. For the rest, the political battle, beyond the name and the councilor sitting in the assembly, continues. «We need to work on the issues and beat a center-right in disarray in Ars», concludes Ardizzone.
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