2023-08-25 17:02:32
The Supreme Court has rejected the request of the PSOE to review more than 30,000 invalid votes obtained in Madrid in the last elections of July 23, considering that the requirements demanded in the doctrine are not met nor have data been provided to verify the relevance of the count in the final result.
“The mere numerical difference in the results that is adduced in this case (1,200 votes) is not a sufficient basis for the review,” says the High Court Holiday Chamber in the sentence in which it dismisses the appeal of the Socialists, against at the discretion of the Prosecutor.
According to the Supreme Court, “logical elements, arithmetic data or solvent statistical calculations have not been provided to verify, even hypothetically, the relevance of the vote review in the final result and in the allocation of the controversial seat”, number 16 that the PP won to the detriment of the PSOE.
After completing the general scrutiny with the external vote of the last general elections, one more seat was confirmed for the PP (137 in total), the popular ones winning that deputy number 16 for Madrid and the PSOE staying with 121 (one less than in the initial count).
It was then that the Socialists went to both the Provincial Electoral Board of Madrid and the Central Electoral Board to review the validity of all invalid votes in the Madrid constituency.
After the rejection of both bodies, they went to the Supreme Court, which has also dismissed their request in a ruling, against which an appeal can be made before the Constitutional Court.
In said resolution, the Supreme Court magistrates argue that the recount of null votes cannot be agreed “preventively”, in case “some erroneous assessment of the null vote favorable” to the Socialists was contemplated.
The Chamber is especially critical of the argument of the PSOE, shared with the Prosecutor’s Office, about the lack of technical-legal knowledge of the citizens who made up the polling stations regarding the nullity of the votes, an allegation that -the sentence underlines- ” seems to be unaware of the pillars on which the electoral process rests”.
Because the electoral law, the judges explain, “parts from the principle of democratic participation and citizen intervention” in the process, “being irrelevant” the aspect that the PSOE questions, and they add that the appreciation of the validity or nullity of the vote “It is not a complex legal operation”, but it is done “in the public act of scrutiny” and it is communicated to the other members, to the auditors and to the representatives of the candidacies.
The Supreme also recalls the presence of the representatives and proxies of the parties at that time, who “guarantee a correct examination of the vote and that they have the capacity to protest”, so that “the work that the law attributes to citizens cannot be questioned in the electoral process.
However, for the Chamber, it cannot be accepted that the mere adjustment of the result requires the supervision or verification of the performance of each polling station, without being based on an irregularity or vice in the process that may imply the lack of correlation between the will of the citizens and the final result.
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