The Table of Congress approved this Tuesday, with the sole abstention of the only representative of the PP who attended the meeting, Adolfo Suárez Illana, a reform of its regulations to put order in the development of its telematic voting, so used since the crisis of the covid-19.
The new resolution thus formalizes the uses and customs extended in this period and that were questioned, especially by the popular ones, last February.
It was then that the Government achieved the approval of the relevant labor reform by a single margin vote, cast erroneously by the current system on the Internet of deputy Alberto Casero.
Parliamentarians who use this method from now on will have to request written permission from the Bureau and justify it for a period.
They will not be able to correct that vote, even if they are wrong,
neither going to Parliament in person nor by calling.
The system seeks to generalize telematic voting at the end of the sessions, in order to listen to all the debates beforehand.
Alberto Casero —the deputy who came out of anonymity from the fourth row of the PP benches, on February 3, after voting several times from his home in Madrid, against the criteria of his party and in favor of the validation of the reform sponsored by the current government - continues to go weekly to Congress.
He is no longer Secretary of Organization of the PP either, after the fall from grace of his boss, the former Secretary General of the party, Teodoro García Egea.
That day he was wrong on several occasions with his telematic vote.
Casero then alleged a gastroenteritis problem, cast his vote from his residence and maintains that, when he realized that he was not the right one (after asking the system for a double confirmation), he tried to call the group of the.
Later he did the same with the Presidency of the Chamber,
Nobody answered him and he went urgently to Congress to solve the error from inside the chamber.
He was not allowed.
The PP tried, initially and at the highest level, to question the method used for years (based on a resolution of 2012 and agreements of October 2021 and February 2022) for this telematic vote in Congress.
The popular even pointed against the president, Meritxell Batet.
The technological services of the Courts totally discarded the option of a technical failure.
The PP then quickly forgot these accusations and the governing bodies of Congress studied methods to clarify and ensure the validity of the system.
This is the objective of the resolution approved this Tuesday, which modifies section 2 of article 82 of the regulation, which regulates the telematic vote of parliamentarians, one of their most important rights and obligations.
In writing, justified and limited in time
The new resolution assesses and orders in a complete manner several previous pronouncements of the Table.
The first thing it specifies is that, in order to have this option, the deputies must request it in writing from that body, justify it and limit it in time.
The Board must justify its authorization, also for a specific period.
The Presidency will be the one that specifies for each plenary session the start and end time of that telematic voting time, ensuring "that the set period ends once the corresponding debate has been completed".
This qualification is one of the most important of the new norm, because what it intends is something theoretically so obvious, but infrequent, as that the deputies "do not vote on issues that have not been debated before in order to previously listen to all the arguments of the different speakers”,
according to House sources aware of the negotiations that resulted in this proposal.
The deputies normally vote according to the leadership of their party.
The plenary sessions of Congress begin on Tuesday afternoon, with some proposals from the opposition, continue on Wednesday with sessions to control the Government, and end on Thursday with the discussion of the Executive's projects.
The usual thing now is that there may be votes on Tuesdays at the end of the day, and even on Thursdays, at different times.
The objective is that, as a general idea, all the votes take place at the end of the Thursday session, as will happen this week.
What does not change is the technological method used to vote electronically.
Deputies enter the Congress intranet with their password.
The system asks them to verify their identity with their digital signature.
Your vote is verified and sent to the Presidency so that it can be announced at the beginning of the vote and in person.
If a deputy voted telematically and then wanted to do so physically from his seat, by mistake, forgetfulness or bad faith, only his telematic vote will be considered valid.
A deputy who is authorized to vote remotely, "whether or not he has done so by that procedure", will not be able to do so in person.
This requirement has been expressly included to solve cases such as that of a Podemos deputy who had asked to vote remotely in the covid-19 reconstruction commission,
he did not and then tried to correct that situation from the same room.
It will not be authorized.
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