It was in 2020 that Izquierda Unida de Albaida of Aljarafe brought to the attention of the courts the alleged irregularities in the municipal electoral process from a previous year, particularly with regard to postal vote. … Then, a case was opened for alleged electoral offense in which eight people are under investigation, including the current mayor, the socialist José Manuel Gelo. To date, only one of those involved has made a statement, which gives an idea of the slowness with which the Court of First Instance and Investigation Number 3 of Sanlúcar la Mayor (today Civil and Investigation Section of the Court of First Instance of Sanlúcar la Mayor, place number 3). In addition, one of the key procedures in this case remains to be developed, namely the visible handwritten proof, as the charges denounce and the prosecution maintains, of the existence of a significant number of postal votes whose documentation presents identical or very similar handwriting.
Despite the initial reluctance of the judge who filed the case, which had to be reopened by order of the Provincial Court of Seville, at the request of the IU lawyer and with the support of the Prosecutor’s Officethe instructor authorized a handwriting expertise to determine who is behind the suspicious requests for postal votes in Albaida del Aljarafe that allegedly favored the PSOE, that is, to find out whose hand is behind fifty requests and who wrote as many others.
He Public Ministryin a document presented to the court last spring, stated that “there is nothing against” the graphics department of the Civil Guard carrying out the calligraphy expertise, for which it will require a set of writings from a number of witnesses who can be accepted by the court given the length of the investigation, in order to prove that they were not the ones who completed the postal voting requests.
In Albaida del Aljarafe, during the 2019 municipal elections, won by the PSOE, with six councilors; The PP remained at five votes and Adelante had six votes to have municipal representation and break the socialist majority. Then they were counted 286 votes thanks to this early system, in a town with around 3,200 inhabitants. If the national average for mail voting was 3.6 percent, in this city it reached 14.92 percent. This is what caught the attention of Izquierda Unida, which reported that up to 47 of these 286 applications present identical handwriting, which would likely coincide with that of the current one. Cultural AdvisorÁngela López, one of the people investigated in this case.
Added to this are other common patterns such as the presence of an “x” to indicate where to sign and similarities in the wording of the requests analyzed, which reinforces for the prosecution the idea that said requests were completed by the same people or “in an organized context”. There are over seventy votes with an “x”.
Some witnesses, before the judge or before the Civil Guard, revealed that this mark had been placed by people from the PSOE. For the prosecution, this testimony highlights the existence of facts that could constitute various crimes of false testimony, for which the handwriting expert is relevant to determine if the signatures match and check the letters and signatureswhich constitute the nuclear element of the type of crime. On the other hand, there would be 182 requests for votes with rectification of dates.
A neighbor from Albaida del Aljarafe admitted before the judge that her request to vote by mail was filled in at the PSOE headquarters by his cousinwho is currently a socialist councilor in the city council and one of the eight people against whom this case is directed. She assured that she had processed the request for a postal vote herself, even though she had completed the documentation at the PSOE headquarters. This witness delivered all the documents with her ID card to the Post Office branch, “one hundred percent certain” because it was the only year she had voted for this system, although she later clarified that it was twice.
“I contacted people from the PSOE to tell them that I wanted to vote by post. I asked for it and it arrived at my house. I had to give my ID. I went to the PSOE house to help me fill out the file and then I said, you fill it, it doesn’t matter to me. The next day, I took (the documentation) to the Post Office with my identity document. This is how this neighbor told how she did it. He added: “I cast my ballot and brought it back to the PSOE house… to the Post Office, sorry.” Questioned by the prosecution lawyer, he named the current cultural advisor as the person who had filled out the papers. “My cousin,” he said.
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