Elections in numbers: 85 million envelopes, 210 thousand ballot boxes and nearly half a million more voters than in 2019

the 23 J Elections They will be the first generals to be held in Spain in July, the date when a large part of Spaniards take a vacation. The exceptionality of the period was reflected in the mail-in voting requests. With over 2.6 million apps, they set an all-time recordAnd the percentage of votes that exceeded 93% (temporary data pending voting until 2:00 in the afternoon). More than 37 million Spaniards are invited to vote, almost half a million more than in the previous election, in November 2019. They will be able to do so for one of 1039 Announce the nominations between Congress and the Senate. Election logistics requires about 210,000 ballot boxes, distributed throughout the country, and about 85 million envelopes made by the State General Administration.

People called to vote

The election will be the 16th general election held in Spain since 1977. 37,466,432 Spaniards have been invited to the polls – 468,534 more voters than in the last election in November 2019 – according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE). Of this number, 35,141,122 reside in Spain and 2,325,310 are abroad, and 1,639,179 are new to the general election, having come of age after the previous vote of Cortes Generales, on November 10, 2019. As new, this is the first general election since 2011 to be held without alleged paid vote, for which the Spaniards living abroad had to ask for a vote in advance.

Next Sunday, voters will choose 350 deputies for the House of Representatives and 208 deputies for the Senate. Each of the peninsula’s provinces selects four senators; Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and Mallorca split three; Ceuta and Melilla, two sen, while Ibiza-Formentera, Menorca, Fuerteventura, La Gomera, El Hierro, Lanzarote and La Palma, one sen.

election day hours

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Participate

Sunday voting will begin at 9:00 a.m. – although polling stations will open early to allow time for tables to be set – and will end at 8:00 p.m. However, if there were people waiting in line before closing time, they would be able to cast their vote. Once polling stations close, counting will begin, and from 9:00 p.m. provisional count data will begin to appear.

Voting centers

For this election, it is expected that 60,340 polling stations will be placed throughout Spain, to which 542,826 people should have been appointed (180,942 as regulars and 361,884 as substitutes), distributed among 22,562 polling stations of 8,131 municipalities. Although it is not possible to know how many polling stations are still pending to resolve the cases in which the appointees requested their release, Ten electoral councils confirmed a district to EL PAÍS In the early days of the campaign, the number of allegations of non-participation of schedules in connection with the last election on May 28 increased.

The historical record of voting by mail

A different element of these elections is that they take place during the summer vacation period. This circumstance means that voting by correspondence has broken all historical records, with more than 2.6 million applications registered and More than 2.4 million votes were cast. This number is much higher than the number recorded in the last general election, where Curiosity registered 986,454 applications, of which 924,403 applications were voted last. The data for 2023 also exceeds that for the June 2016 election, which so far holds all-time records, with 1,453,446 applications cast and 1,357,745 votes cast.

Mobilization of 90,282 security personnel

For this election, the Ministry of Interior designed a security apparatus It consists of 90,282 agents from state, provincial and local police forces. In the last municipal and regional elections on May 28, a total of 98,991 people were mobilized, an increase of 8.8%. The Civil Guard will be the party that mobilizes the largest number of forces, with 41,054 members, followed by the National Police, with 28,792 members. Added to this are 99 agents from the unit attached to Generalitat Valenciana. Musos de Escuadra will provide 4,055 soldiers in Catalonia. the Ertzaintza, 1217 in the Basque Country; The Police of Foral in Navarre, 230, and the Police of the Canary Islands, 67. Local police officers are involved with 14,768 officials throughout the national territory. The terrorism alert level has remained at 4 (high risk, on a scale of five) since June 2015.

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