Government and PP agree on the main lines of the foreign vote reform

Spaniards residing in Peru vote at diplomatic offices in Lima, in 2016.Juanjo Fernandez

The suppression of the requested vote, that is, the obligation of the more than 2.2 million Spaniards residing abroad to previously request the vote to participate in the elections, is emerging as one of the few consensuses between the parties in this legislature .

The amendments presented to the bill promoted by the PSOE and United We Can last year reveal that there are no major differences in substance, after the essential elements of the reform have already been negotiated in recent months.

Now the small print remains to be completed and the Socialists hope that the text will be ready to send to the Senate in May.

With that calendar, it would hardly be applicable in the Andalusian elections this year, although it would be in the municipal, regional and general elections of 2023.

"We have made a lot of progress, we agree on the essentials, the suppression of the requested vote, but important fringes still have to be negotiated, because they affect the guarantees of the process," warns the PP deputy José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro.

"What it is about is making it easier for Spaniards abroad to exercise their right to vote and at the same time establish a procedure that prevents the irregularities that the left itself denounced with the previous system from recurring."

Until 2011, Spaniards registered abroad received the documentation and ballot papers to vote ex officio.

The system gave rise to numerous complaints of fraud.

In countries such as Argentina, it was detected that electoral agents took over the documents of people who had already died or had changed their address and, taking advantage of the lack of control of the Spanish Administration over the process, managed to supplant the voter.

After years of controversy, an agreement between the main parties established the obligation to previously request voting documents.

What was intended to be a guarantee became an insurmountable bureaucratic obstacle course for most, at a time when the crisis was pushing tens of thousands of young people to emigrate.

If in the general elections of 2008 31% of residents abroad had voted, in the last elections of 2019 it did not reach 7%.

And, meanwhile, the so-called census of absent residents (CERA) has not stopped growing.

Since the general elections in November 2019, it has increased by another 130,000 and in the last update in March it already reached 2,261,421, 6% of the total number of registered voters.

The subcommittee created in Congress for the reform has listened in recent months to the opinions of experts to find a formula that allows ending the begged vote without opening the door to the irregularities of the previous system.

In the initial proposal presented last year by PSOE and United We Can, it was established that, instead of sending the ballots to homes, they would be downloaded electronically.

As the PP raised objections on understanding that voters with difficulties in accessing computer devices could be discriminated against, the two government parties have agreed to maintain the sending of physical ballots, without ruling out the option of telematic downloads.

To try to generalize this last formula,

the text commits the Executive to present a plan of actions within a year from the entry into force of the reform.

What has not been considered is the possibility of establishing electronic voting.

“All the opinions that we have heard in the subcommittee coincided in that there are no guarantees about his safety”, underlines Bermúdez de Castro.

Another of the reforms that seek to facilitate the vote from abroad is the extension of the deadlines to do so in person at diplomatic representations and for the scrutiny of these votes in Spain.

The PP amendments claim to extend some of those deadlines, reinforce the guarantees for the identification of the voter in the case of voting by mail or increase the places enabled to exercise the face-to-face vote.

The PSOE does not expect great difficulties for the final agreement.

"We wanted to act in the spirit of the constitutional fathers," says the socialist José Zaragoza.

"From the first moment we have sought a reform that belongs to all, not to one party."

PSOE and UP have presented joint amendments to their own text that include demands raised by other parties.

The amendments presented to the text reveal that on the question of the requested vote, beyond some nuances, the coincidence is broad from Vox to the independentistas.

But some groups have taken the opportunity to propose more far-reaching reforms.

The PNV, for example, recovers an old nationalist claim, dividing the current single constituency in the European elections by autonomous communities.

Ciudadanos goes much further and proposes a genuine in-depth reform of the electoral law to, among other things, establish a distribution of seats in Congress that is more proportional to the population, also change the Senate election system or impose the holding of two campaign debates between the formations with a parliamentary group.

Neither PSOE nor PP are willing to enter these matters now,

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