Correos has admitted 63,000 requests to vote by mail for the February 18 elections in Galicia. The figure, collected by Europa Press, far exceeds, by 35%, the number of requests registered in 2016. This is the call that should be taken as a reference given that in the next one, in 2020, the pandemic that triggered the number of requests. Compared to four years ago, voting by mail would have fallen by 15%.
Can the increase in requests by mail in the call on the 18th be read as an early indicator of an increase in participation? Perhaps, but it is also true that many voters discovered the option of voting by mail with the pandemic and it cannot be ruled out that this 35% increase responds to that logic. Simply put, we vote more by mail because with the pandemic we learned to do so.
Without going any further, in the general elections of July last year in A Coruña alone, more than 53,000 requests to vote by mail were registered. But in this case we must also remember that the electoral call, in the middle of summer, increased demand.
So, with this data it is possible to make any conjecture. What does seem evident is that participation in these Galician elections will be above that of 2020. A lot or a little? On the 18th the doubts will be cleared up. For now, at least in the polls, 20% declare themselves abstentionist and another 20% have not yet decided what they will vote for.
