The PP launched a political offensive this Thursday after the theft of a safe in a post office in Fuente de Cantos (Badajoz), which contained 124 votes already cast for Sunday’s Extremadura elections and which the Civil Guard is investigating as a case of common dispute, like other thefts in the region. In the final part of the campaign, the president of the region, María Guardiola, declared to Extremadurans that “we are stealing” their right to vote. For the popular, both at the national and regional level, “everything suggests that this is a perfectly organized strategy with the sole objective of postal voting”.
This is not the first time that the PP has used this strategy in an electoral campaign. The PP has put on the table the fear of possible electoral fraud and the distrust of postal voting in many other calls.
In 2023, Feijóo asked postmen to distribute votes despite their bosses
PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo addressed postal workers, two weeks before the elections, to ask them to work “as much as possible”, “morning, afternoon and evening”, to distribute the postal vote on time. He did so at a campaign rally in Murcia and went so far as to say that “whoever their bosses were, they would distribute all the votes before the deadline.” An ambiguous sentence which cast doubts on the management of the Post Office, chaired by Juan Manuel Serrano, the former chief of staff of Pedro Sánchez.
Later, the leader of the People’s Party had to qualify his remarks and stressed that “no one was talking about a hard blow” during the postal vote, but rather that he was referring to the “traffic jams” that were occurring in the distribution. Feijóo was president of Correos during José María Aznar’s second term.
A few months before the general elections, the general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, suggested that Correos was not providing the necessary means to guarantee that all votes reached the polls and referred to the “direct relationship” between the current former president of the company, Juan Manuel Serrano, and the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez.
Díaz Ayuso, in 2023. “Sánchez will leave as he came back, with an attempted punch”
The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, ended her electoral campaign for the 2023 municipal and regional elections by attacking Sánchez and fueling the idea that electoral fraud was brewing: “Sánchez will leave as he came back, with an attempted punch. And there are his weapons, the decree, the punch.”
A candidate in Murcia: “No postman was hired for delivery”
PP senator Francisco Bernabé also raised doubts about possible electoral fraud in the 2023 elections, when he aspired to occupy a seat in the Upper House of the Murcia region. Bernabé published the following message on his social networks: “Be very careful with this, whoever requested the postal vote can no longer vote in person at the polling stations and even the Post Office employees themselves warn that there are not enough postmen engaged to make the delivery… Does it smell like a stink? »
Andalusia, 2022: “They launched the control of Indra who counts the votes”
The vice-president of the European People’s Party, Esteban González Pons, assured during a press conference on June 27, 2022 that the government of Pedro Sánchez has “a vocation to control state institutions”. “After the Andalusian elections, she took control of Indra and insisted that the company “count the votes”. These statements were denied by the company itself, which assured that it was responsible for processing the data and not for counting.
Javier Arènes in 1993:
On election night in 1993, Felipe González’s PSOE emerged victorious in the elections, and Javier Arenas, a key figure in the PP, gave a press conference questioning control: “Our party has decided to ask for clarification from the Central Electoral Commission, on what the extraordinary operation during the opening hours of the polling stations means.” In his speech that evening, he also called on listeners and representatives of the PP, who were still in some polling stations not yet closed, to exercise extreme caution and exercise utmost diligence.
The same evening, in an interview, Rodrigo Rato even questioned the electoral census in Spain: “A fault of our administration which must be corrected because there have already been two revisions of the census, one ordinary and one extraordinary, which we have demanded and which the government, however, has been unable to guarantee the right to vote for all. King Juan Carlos I spoke with José María Aznar, then candidate of the PP, and after the call they admitted defeat.
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