The emigrant vote of 28-M did not finally make any seat dance. The Provincial Electoral Board counted this Friday the so-called CERA vote (Census of Resident-Absentee Voters), which doubled the figures of the last elections and which went mainly to the Socialist Party. José Vélez’s list scratched 881 of the 2,640 ballots that arrived from other countries.
The PP was the second party with the most votes with 658 votes, followed by Vox, with 357, and the Podemos-IU Verdes coalition, which collected 279. Más Región -Verdes Equo added 107 votes, Ciudadanos another 69 votes and Movimiento Ciudadano, 23. Some numbers that do not change the photograph of the election night and maintain the current distribution of the Assembly. The Provincial Electoral Board must carry out this afternoon the count of 32 ballot boxes that could not be counted on Sunday due to a computer failure, five of them related to Cartagena. Movimiento Ciudadano hopes that the votes included in those ballot boxes will allow it to reach the act that it lost at the last minute in favor of the PSOE.
Multiple incidents
The vote of Murcians residing abroad registered a strong increase in these elections. In a busy day, the Provincial Electoral Board managed to count more than 2,600 ballots, a figure that doubles the 1,100 votes that were counted in the May 2019 elections.
The unknown about the incidence that the emigrant vote was going to have on the final results of 28-M was extended longer than expected due to the nearly two hundred incidents that were initially detected on ballot papers and that had to be scrupulously scrutinized by the members of the Provincial Electoral Board.
The components of this body toiled for hours studying case by case and detecting numerous episodes of lack of documentation, as explained by the board itself. Some votes, mainly those coming from France, were not accompanied by a photocopy of the DNI, in others the necessary certificate did not have a signature and some envelopes even arrived empty. A cascade of incidents that some linked to the changes applied to the vote-by-mail system, since the ‘vote requested’ had disappeared and a procedure that made it difficult to complete all the necessary procedures on time had been eliminated.
In the recount, held in the annex building of the Víctor Villegas auditorium in Murcia, there was no lack of representatives of the main parties, who for hours ensured that the ballots of their formations arrived at a good port. The president of the PSRM, Alfonso Martínez Baños, accompanied by some other party members, remained for hours at the facilities to closely follow a count in which they ended up taking the cat to water.
Nor did the lawyer Alejandro Zamora, manager of the PP, lose detail of the day, accompanied by other historical leaders of the formation, such as Verónica López. At the gates of the building, the numbers three and four of Vox to the Assembly, Alberto Garre and Rubén Martínez, took the opportunity to show their cards after the results of 28-M placed Abascal’s formation in a strategic position. María Jesús Ros, the Citizens candidate for the Assembly, also dropped by Víctor Villegas but she left the building before the results were known.
The opening and counting of the ballots, which began around two in the afternoon, left some curious anecdotes, such as the envelopes that included the ballots for multiple parties -and which were considered invalid- or the one with the illustration of a chorizo -and the phrase, vote for the same parasites again?- with which a Murcian living abroad wanted to record his political discredit more than evident.
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