The Mayor of Barcelona and BComú candidate Ada Colau after the results of election night. Gianluca Battista
Barcelona en comú, the party of the incumbent mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, has appealed to the zone’s electoral board against the final count of the results of the municipal elections of the past 28-M so that they are credited with the 150 votes passed by a law the Ciutat Vella district, which they believe was accidentally delivered to citizens. In the vote reporting form, the boxes of the parties Ciutadans, Barcelona en comú and PACMA were consecutive and the municipalities understand that their boxes were wrongly assigned to the orange party. The appeal to the Electoral Committee does not affect the planned date of the inauguration of the future mayor (July 17), which would only be affected if an appeal were made before the court hearing (then the inauguration would be postponed to July 7). ). .
Friday’s recount was important because the Comunes – in first place after Xavier Trias (Junts) – finished third (with nine aldermen) behind the PSC (10 aldermen) with just under 141 ballots. Colau’s party hoped that if it finished second in the final count, it would have more legitimacy to lead an attempt to agree a tripartite pact between them, the Socialists and the ERC. But the recount widened the gap between the citizens and the socialists: from 141 to 342 votes.
The party led by Colau had until midnight on Saturday to appeal the final vote count, which took place on Friday in the Ciutat de la Justícia. The formation has reported doing so late Saturday and appealed to the zone’s Electoral Board after noting some “material errors” in the voting roll. Citizens are also demanding that all envelopes containing invalid votes be opened, because this time there were 6,400 (triple the number in 2019) and at the final count, a quarter of those are usually declared valid. This was the case in previous municipal elections: of the 2,013 invalid votes counted on election night, almost 500 were invalidated when the count was held the following Friday.
After almost 10 hours of tense counting last Friday at the zone’s electoral board in the Judicial City of Barcelona, the final results remain with the same distribution of councilors as last Sunday, May 28, so that Xavier Trias (Junts) prevails 11 councillors, followed by Jaume Collboni with 10 councilors and Colau with nine. Specifically, Barcelona en comú has now requested that the protocol of Table 1-045-U from Ciutat Vella be considered valid, reflecting five votes for Ciudadanos, 150 for them and four for PACMA, as they understand that it is ” “im Consistent” with the number of votes cast and that there are also two copies of the minutes confirming it.
Finally, in the recount carried out last Friday by the zone’s electoral board, BComú was awarded a total of 4 votes and CS 150 votes, referring to Table 1-045-U, which Colau’s party attributes to a material error by skipping one of them has the columns. For this reason, BComú, in its appeal, requests that the results reflected in these minutes be considered valid – with 150 votes for Colau, 4 for PACMA and 5 for CS – approved on election night and which were not at last Friday taken into account in the count.
With the difference between PSC and BComú widening to 342 votes at last Friday’s count, acceptance of this appeal would entail little change in the current balance of power unless new changes were added, drawn from potential resources of other candidatures come. According to BComú, her appeal does not constitute a challenge and does not affect the inauguration date, although she believes she has the right to request clarification of what she believes were errors in the count.
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