The mistake of the PP deputy: he voted ‘yes’ to validate the labor reform and ‘no’ to process it as a bill

The validation of the labor reform went ahead this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies by a very narrow majority of one vote. There were 175 votes in favor and 174 against. And that the two deputies of UPN whom the leadership of their party forced to vote ‘yes’ decided to break the voting discipline and turned to ‘no’.

The very tight accounts that the Government had –after the announcement of the ‘yes’ by UPN, late on Wednesday, there were 176 ‘yeses’ versus 173 ‘noes’– would have meant that, with the change of opinion of Foralista parliamentarians, the labor reform would have been repealed.

But that only vote in favor that decided the final validation was produced by the error of a PP deputy, the parliamentarian for Cáceres Alberto Casero. From the PP they maintain that the error has been in the voting system. That Casero, in fact, voted ‘no’, but that the system registered him as a ‘yes’. And that the deputy, parliamentarian for Cáceres and “in a situation of illness”, as recognized by the PP’s own spokesperson in Congress, Cuca Gamarra, came to travel to Madrid to, in person, try to have his telematic vote annulled and that he did not he was allowed to enter the hemicycle.

The official sources of the Lower House consulted by this newspaper rule out, however, that a situation like the one described by the PP could occur because there is a system of double verification of telematic votes. And remember that, once the telematic vote has been issued, it cannot be suspended to vote in person, nor can it be changed.

The vote has been validated by the General Secretariat

The services of the Lower House say, in fact, that Casero voted ‘yes’ to the validation of the labor reform and ‘no’ to its being processed as a bill, just the opposite of the vote decreed by the PP leadership. His vote is correctly registered, according to these sources, and has been ratified by the General Secretariat of the Congress of Deputies and by the house’s computer scientists.

Despite everything, the PP spokesperson in Congress, Cuca Gamarra, asked for the floor after the face-to-face vote denouncing that, “prior to the vote, a computer error has been revealed to the Table”, alluding to the vote of the deputy Casero. President Batet replied that “precisely because the Table is aware” of what happened “and it is a technical matter for the Table”, she did not give him the floor, which has generated enormous anger in the ranks popular.