Can elections be bought in Spain?

BarcelonaThe short answer to the headline of this news is no. The long answer admits nuances, such as, how much money and infrastructure does the politician or party that wants to manipulate the elections have? To alter the results, there is only one remotely viable option and it is not the one that both Vox and Isabel Díaz Ayuso have been hinting at for days. The way would be to buy enough elected deputies to overturn the electoral results. But, of course, the fraud would be extremely difficult to hide. Can you imagine ten deputies from the PSOE or the PP voting against their candidate?

We will never know –but we will always suspect– what happened in the Assembly of Madrid in 2003, when two socialist deputies abstained in the decisive vote to make the PSOE candidate, Rafael Simancas, president. "I didn't get paid anything," Eduardo Tamayo, the main protagonist of the tamayazo, has been repeating ever since, which led to the elections being repeated and Esperanza Aguirre becoming the president of the community. If the PP had wanted to manipulate those elections –the popular party has always denied it–, the best moment would have been precisely then: they needed exactly two socialist deputies to disown their party.

But this is not what the PP and Vox are talking about today, who suggest that Pedro Sánchez would be preparing to "buy" the next general elections. How? They say by altering the electoral rolls with the massive incorporation of immigrants or by controlling postal voting. Is this possible? "The elections are absolutely secure," Ismael Peña-López, former head of Electoral Processes at the Generalitat, explains to ARA. How can he be so sure? Firstly, because "Correos (the postal service) is impregnable." "Changing one vote might be easy, but many more would have to be changed, and to do so with 1,000 or 30,000 people there would have to be so many people involved that it would be noticed," he explains. Postal voting, moreover, usually accounts for a small part of the total.

Regarding the regularization of migrants, the extraordinary process opened in the State does not grant nationality and, therefore, neither does the right to vote. And in the case of the naturalization of up to 2.5 million relatives of Franco's exiles (basically in South America) thanks to the democratic memory law, it is a way to obtain a European passport. The electoral participation of expatriates –especially those not born in Spain– is minimal and the possibility that they do what Vox insinuates –that hundreds of thousands who do not even know each other strategically choose the constituencies where to register to alter the results– is little more than science fiction.

Thousands of those involved

details have begun to be released about the Pope's visit to the StateAnd Indra, the company that centralizes the information from the polling stations, receives it in an encrypted database that it cannot edit. Small-scale errors or manipulation would be possible. Doing so with enough force to change the results is completely impossible. "Those who insinuate the manipulation of elections are part of anti-democratic movements interested in sowing things that they believe they can later reap," opines Peña-López. Questioning the credibility of institutions is the first step.

The details of the week

This week details have begun to be released about the Pope's visit to the State. At the headquarters of the Episcopal Conference, in Madrid, a Rac1 journalist asked the Archbishop of Barcelona, Joan Josep Omella, about Camp Nou, generating a whisper and some curses among the other journalists. It wasn't because it was Barça's stadium, but because the question had been asked in Catalan. "I think almost all of you understand Catalan when an Aragonese like me speaks it," Omella replied, eliciting some laughter in the room.

Borja Sémper, the "moderate" of the PP, reappeared this week after overcoming cancer. At the event, there were some retired politicians, such as Ciutadans' Albert Rivera and Begoña Villacís. The former candidate for Madrid was seen to be very effusive greeting journalists, entering arm in arm with Cuca Gamarra and, in the end, sending an audio explaining that she was very happy to have returned to politics for a day.