The Central Electoral Board analyzes the appeal of the PSOE for the alleged plot to buy votes by mail in Mojácar

The PSOE is complying with what was announced days ago to challenge the municipal elections in Mojácar (Almería) after the police operation investigated by a court in Vera and which keeps eleven people under investigation, including numbers 2 and 5 of the socialist candidacy (Francisco Bartolomé Flores and Cristóbal Vizcaíno) and a municipal official, gravedigger in the town and representative of the PP of Mojácar in the 2019 municipal elections, identified as LMLR and known as Luisón.

The deadlines are fast in this matter since, according to article 108.3 of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG), the day after an appeal has been filed, the Electoral Board will forward the file, with its report, to the Central Electoral Board, as it did this Tuesday, summoning the representatives of the competing candidacies in the constituency so that they can appear before the Board Central Electoral within the next day. Afterwards, the Central Electoral Board will resolve the appeal. If the PSOE request is rejected again, the sources assure that an electoral contentious appeal will be filed

The PSOE denounced the PP for “preparing” votes by mail a week before the arrest of two of its candidates. Days later it emerged that the gravedigger from Mojácar became the eighth investigated in the alleged plot to purchase a vote by mail and that he had been “off the radar” of the UCO investigators during the proceedings carried out by order of the judge. .

The “guarantee” of seized envelopes

It should be remembered that, after 28M, nothing has changed the configuration of the local Mojácar corporation with respect to 2019 after the police operation on May 24, four days before the elections. The PP has revalidated the absolute majority although it has lost almost half a point of support, while the arrests of the two PSOE candidates have had no repercussions on the Socialists since support even increased in percentage of votes (from 38.64% in 2019 at 40.44% this Sunday). In absolute terms, the popular ones went from 1,692 votes to 1,596 and the PSOE barely lost seven votes, going from 1,145 in 2019 to 1,138 on election day.

During 28M, as reported by Europa Press, Civil Guard agents intervened a total of 701 vote-by-mail envelopes at the seven polling stations installed in the municipality in response to the document presented to the Zone Electoral Board (JEZ) by the candidate Socialist, Manuel Zamora, who requested that they be kept in order for their “expert/judicial analysis” to proceed.

This is stated in the letter that the first candidate of the PSOE, Manuel Zamora, presented the presidents of the seven polling stations of Mojácar, to which this newspaper had access, and where he considered that “having knowledge of the extraordinary number of votes by mail” in these elections in Mojácar with “notable percentage” differences in that sense with respect to the national, regional and local ones in addition to the “events that have occurred”. The custody of these votes could “constitute a guarantee for the determination of the clarification of the events” and that make it a matter, in Zamora’s opinion, of “flawed” elections, who comments to this medium that the mayoress “quickly took to a neighbor who was not allowed to vote because they told her that she had already voted by mail and she denied it”.