Melilla (EFE) of them in assaults on postmen in various parts of the city.
Last Monday, when the distribution of electoral documentation began, hooded people who were driving vehicles without license plates in disadvantaged neighborhoods such as La Cañada, Las Palmeras and Minas del Rif, stole the votes from the postmen before they could deliver them.
The incidents raised a concentration of protest and solidarity from officials asking for more security, but the next day there was another robbery of about thirty votes in another humble neighborhood, Tiro Nacional-Averroes.
The facts are already being investigated and are of “maximum gravity”, because they put “in question” the elections and “democracy itself”, as stressed from Lisbon by the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
For now, the postmen are escorted by agents of the National Police and Civil Guard, while security has been reinforced at the Post Office, both abroad, where there was already a permanent patrol since the day the elections, as within.
Security at the port and airport has also been strengthened; the stolen votes, around a hundred, have been annulled.
The police in Correos de Melilla, an old controversy
This controversy is not new, not even in these elections in which the two main parties running, the PP and the Coalition for Melilla (CPM), have come to defend the annulment of all votes that are not deposited by the voter himself in the ballot box, something the PSOE opposed for violating the law.
The Socialists have launched a campaign recalling that buying or selling votes is a punishable electoral crime that can lead to jail sentences, as well as significant damage to democracy.
Melilla is where people vote by mail the most: in the municipal elections of May 2019, there were 4,210, 7.78% of the census; in the general elections of that year, the figure was close to 6,000, 11% of the total, almost five times more than the national average (2.93%).
In the absence of a few days before the deadline to request it, the provisional data already exceeds the last record, which raises the suspicion, normalized among the people of Melilla, of buying votes in exchange for amounts that are close to three digits.
The theft of ballots, according to the PP, takes place at homes as soon as the postmen turn around after delivering them: “This Thursday, in a house with three applications in the Calvo Sotelo neighborhood, they offered them 80 euros for each one”, assured the popular candidate, Juan José Imbroda.
buying votes
The parties accuse each other of being behind this practice, which in the 2008 general elections ended with the sentence of two years in prison and the disqualification of the then PSOE general secretary, Dionisio Muñoz, and the still president of the Coalition for Melilla (CPM). , Mustafa Aberchán, for buying postal votes in exchange for employment plans.
CPM and PSOE have also accused the PP of buying votes several times, once in exchange for food stamps, in a case where the former deputy minister, Hassan Driss, was acquitted; and another two days after the end of the April 2019 general campaign, after a hidden camera video recorded at the popular headquarters appeared, with the son of the party president as the protagonist.
The Justice archived both complaints and Imbroda himself described the case as “a scoundrel” against the PP, considering that it was a “false complaint operation”.