Once the polls are closed and the voting day is over at 8:00 p.m. on July 23, the counting of the general elections begins. This is one of the steps on the way to knowing the composition of the Congress and the Senate. It is a public procedure in which the auditors act as witnesses so that the process is followed according to regulations. The rules are included in the third chapter of Royal Decree-Law 20/1977, of March 18, on Electoral Rules.
The members of the polling stations are in charge of receiving the ballots and later counting them. The scrutiny is led by the president of the polling station and begins once he closes the vote. This does not happen until all the members of the table and the intervenors have also voted. First, the ballot box for Congress is counted, followed by the Senate.
The president of the polling station must extract the votes, one by one; open the envelope and read aloud the candidacy, in Congress, or the voted candidates, in the case of the Senate. The ballot is then shown to the members and to the auditors and proxies of the parties present there. The members of the table must contrast the number of ballots extracted from the ballot box with the number of voters registered during the day. Both numbers must match.
The regulations clearly indicate in which cases the vote must be annulled. If the ballot is not the official one, if the ballot is not inside an envelope, or if the envelope contains more than one ballot, it is automatically void. Nor is it possible to admit a ballot to Congress in which the voter has crossed out a name or has tried to change the order of the list. Those ballots to the Senate that contain more votes than allowed will also be annulled.
The law also provides for cases in which ballots are left in doubt in the count if there is no consensus among the members of the polling station, so that the decision is left until the end and a majority vote is taken. When the count is over (and doubts or complaints derived from it have been resolved) the president will announce the result and the table will draw up a tally sheet.
At each table there will be a representative of the administration. One of his functions will be to send a copy of said act to the data aggregation center of the Ministry of the Interior. This is the reason why the results are known so quickly during election night.
Once the scrutiny (that is, of all the tables) of each election is carried out tonight, the provisional results will be obtained. The Government informs about them because that is how it is included in the General Electoral Regime Law (Loreg). The official and final count will be carried out by the competent Electoral Board five days after the elections, when these procedures are completed. The results will be published in the Official State Gazette.
