Vox spokesperson in the Assembly, Rocío Monasterio, has asked the Regional Chamber Board to annul the sanction of fifteen days without pay that was imposed after casting a fraudulent vote during the plenary session on February 1, alleging that the seat that he tried to turn off “should never have worked.”
Vox has registered a reconsideration letter against the sanction in the Assembly, ensuring that the parliamentary group has learned “through internal investigations” that the voting system of the deputies can be modified manually, something that was not explained to Vox when it was group asked for background information on similar situations.
“This shows that the ultimate purpose of the investigation was to punish, for which they even went so far as to hide exculpatory evidence for this purpose, and using the services of the Chamber for this purpose,” denounces the Monasterio group.
The story of the events begins on January 25, when the number two of the Vox parliamentary group, José Luis Ruiz Bartolomé, announced that he was leaving his seat to return to private business. On January 31, the day before the session starts, the next person on Vox’s list, Pablo Gutiérrez de Cabiedes, resigns from his seat, so the parliamentary group has one less deputy in the plenary session the following day. .
On February 1, in the Plenary voting, the president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio, warned: “Before voting, I clarify that a deputy, by mistake, has pressed the presence button in two different seats,” and the February 5, the Assembly announced that it would open an investigation into a possible fraudulent vote.
Monasterio acknowledged that he pressed buttons during the vote: “Both seats turned on… I tried to turn off the one next to me, I hit all the possible buttons, the one for presence, abstention… And that wouldn’t turn off,” He assured, although he called it “things of technology.”
“As is known, the Minister of Digitalization, Miguel López-Valverde, voted up to four times from a seat that does not correspond to him without any consequence from the president of the Board. This is how Rocío Monasterio presented it in her allegations. Therefore, the arbitrariness of the procedure is demonstrated by considering that both errors were unintentional. But one was archived and another was sanctioned,” Vox now claims when requesting that the sanction be annulled.
Furthermore, Vox denounces “the interference of the Executive Branch in the Legislative Branch”, since “it is not until the president of the Government of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, gives the order to the president of the Assembly Board, Enrique Ossorio, that the entire formal procedure begins and which until that moment I had not noticed.”