“Although in the short term this trickle of alleged cases of electoral fraud is negative for democratic health, in the long run – when all this noise passes – the result will be an even more guaranteed democratic system with practices – that have been repeated since the beginning of democracy – that they will be banished”. This is the diagnosis made by Moncloa about the disarticulation of plots to buy and sell votes by mail that have marked the last bars of the electoral campaign for today's elections. And it is that in the Government there is the conviction that what happened in recent days will not fall on deaf ears and the Executive of Pedro Sánchez intends after the elections this Sunday to propose a reform of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (Loreg) to plugging the cracks that voting by mail has revealed, with the aim of putting an end to electoral fraud that Moncloa considers to come from afar.
The Ministry of the Interior verified in 2015, the year of regional and local elections such as those of this 2023, a total of 43 criminal offenses against electoral legislation such as the scandals that have come to light this week. That figure rose to 65 cases in the 2019 elections. Five of them occurred in Melilla, which, on this occasion, has become the epicenter of the earthquake that has shaken the final stretch of the campaign. Few doubt that the aftershocks of that earthquake in Mojácar (Almería), Albudeite (Murcia) or Arona (Tenerife) would hardly have been publicly disclosed without the amplifiers of political rallies. "The State has reacted in a police, judicial and political manner to a reality that existed," state government sources.
At the police level, ministerial sources assure that "for the first time" there was a forceful slogan to put an end to the plots to buy and sell votes that have been rampant in Melilla for decades. There were precedents in the autonomous city. In 2021, the Supreme Court sentenced the leader of the Coalition for Melilla (CpM), Mustafá Aberchán, to two years in prison for a crime of electoral fraud committed in 2008. The massive request to vote by mail this year –reached 20% while the national average is 3%– accelerated the investigation that, although it is still open, resulted in the arrest of a member of the Melilla government, who ended up being dismissed 24 hours later. The major scandal – it is estimated that the plot was able to buy some 10,000 votes – has also highlighted the coordinated action of the State Security Forces and Bodies that have prevented ballot boxes full of votes from leaving for the Peninsula to consummate the fraud.
At the judicial level, there is an unwritten rule in the world of courts according to which, during electoral campaigns, no significant judicial decisions are made that could influence the course of the elections. However, on this occasion, investigating judges have ordered operations a few days after the opening of the polling stations. “In this way, the neatness and legitimacy of the result of 28-M has been preserved. If the disarticulation of the plots is carried out after Sunday, the result can be questioned ”, assess legal sources.
At the political level, the Ministry of the Interior made a move in the face of the attempted fraud that was being brewed in Melilla, requesting the Zone Electoral Board that the DNI be essential when casting the vote at the Post Office. At the moment, the system only obliges when the electoral documentation for postal suffrage is received. This measure, taken when only 704 of more than 11,700 applications had been delivered, has allowed some 5,000 suspicious votes to be left out of the polls. In the Government they are convinced that this unprecedented measure taken by the Electoral Board must become law, so that, after the elections, a reform of the organic law will be promoted so that any citizen must hand over their ID when casting their vote. A crack in the system that the Melilla scandal has also served to highlight.
However, yesterday, the Secretary of State for Communication, Francesc Vallès, guaranteed the transparency, security and neutrality of the elections and stated that the electoral process in Spain is "one of the safest and most guaranteed in the world" while considering that recent incidents should not influence participation.
