Junts has presented a formal protest to each of the Provincial Electoral Boards (JEP) of Catalonia to request the repetition of the vote of the Census of Absent Resident Spaniards (CERA) after having detected – as indicated in the documents presented to the JEP of Barcelona, ??Tarragona, Lleida and Girona to which La Vanguardia has had access—“serious irregularities” in the counting of the foreign vote in the elections of May 12.
According to the party led by Carles Puigdemont, the repetition would be pertinent since, they consider, “the rights of the voters have been violated.”
The independence party points out that in each of the districts there is a percentage of CERA votes that “were not entered into the ballot box or were destroyed.” “This destruction of the votes cast was hasty and was carried out improperly, violating both the rights of the voters and the candidates, since the passage of the legal challenge deadlines was not respected,” they claim.
As they point out in their complaints, in Barcelona there were 1,922 votes not counted (11.05% of the total received); in Girona, 446 (22.84%); and in Lleida, 320 (18.8%). In Tarragona, the JEP, according to Junts, has not yet provided the information, scheduling the training for next Monday.
It is in Lleida where the difference in votes for one of the seats that were disputed between the PSC and Junts was closest. Finally, the CERA vote has secured the seat for the socialists by a difference of around 700 votes.
Junts denounces a “violation of defense rights, lack of transparency”, a situation of “distrust in the electoral system” due to the “possible irregularities” derived from the “lack of access to destroyed votes”, something that, they criticize, prevents the action of electoral justice.
For the moment, the CERA vote does not change the distribution of seats established after the elections in Catalonia last Sunday, despite the fact that there were tight results in the provinces of Lleida and Tarragona.
After the elections of May 12 in Catalonia, the PSC won the elections with 42 seats, followed by Junts with 35, ERC with 20 and the Popular Party with 15. With these results, the independence movement did not have an absolute majority, but there was a possibility that Junts won one more seat thanks to voters abroad.
However, with the results of the external vote announced by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia in the provinces of Lleida, Girona and Tarragona, there are finally no changes in these constituencies and the distribution of seats remains the same as it did in the last Sunday.
One of the seats that could dance was in the province of Lleida, where there was a difference of 761 votes between Junts and the PSC. Finally, Carles Puigdemont’s party got 380 votes and the socialists 386, so that Salvador Illa’s party is left with the same seats it got last Sunday, 42.
Likewise, there were no changes in the provinces of Girona and Tarragona. In Girona, Aliança Catalana had the option of taking a seat from the PSC, although it needed more than 2,000 votes to do so. However, Silvia Orriols’ party gets 49 votes with the CERA vote and the PSC 502.
The party with the most votes in this province in the CERA vote has been that of Carles Puigdemont, with 579, followed by the PSC and ERC, the latter with 237 votes. For its part, the PP obtains 176 votes, the Comuns 110, Vox 84 and the CUP 83. These results do not change any seats of the rest of the political formations.
In Tarragona there was also the possibility that the CUP could remove a deputy from the PSC, since it was 570 votes away. However, the independence party only got 77 votes from abroad, while the socialists had the most votes with 548.
