Paula Boira Nacher and Mercedes Ortuño Lizarán |
Madrid (EFE) the campaign for the general elections from July to 23, according to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The electoral propaganda census is the tool that political parties use to carry out a practice known as mailing, which consists of sending each voter an envelope with the ballots and envelopes necessary to vote for the party in question.
Citizens have the right to request that this advertisement not be sent to them, something that the majority of Aragonese do, where 4.35% of voters have unsubscribed from this service.
Madrid is the second autonomous community with the lowest losses -3.86% of voters-, followed by La Rioja (3.74%) and Navarra (3.25%).
Before the local and regional elections on May 28, 895,257 people had requested removal from the propaganda census, that is, since then 70,640 new voters have requested it.
What does each party spend on electoral propaganda?
In the general elections of November 2019, the PP was the party that spent the most on mailboxes: 6.1 million euros, 6.4 million if one also takes into account what was spent by Navarra Suma and PP-Foro, candidacies where the popular were present.
According to the Audit Report of the party accounts of the Court of Accounts, the PP sent electoral propaganda to 34 million voters, practically the same as the PSOE, which, adding to the PSC, spent 5.9 million euros.
Unidas Podemos was the third party that invested the most money in mailboxes, 3.6 million euros if the expense of En Comú Podem and En Común Podem are added, two candidacies that did not receive a subsidy for not meeting the stipulated criteria.
These criteria also affected parties such as Compromís, JxCat, Coalición Canaria or the BNG, from which, since they did not receive a subsidy, we do not know the scope of sending ballots.
For its part, Vox spent 1.8 million euros to send envelopes, ballots and propaganda to 17.3 million voters.
mailbox grant
This electoral tactic is subsidized by the State, which bears the cost of sending the propaganda.
The parties receive said aid based on their results at the polls, although they have the possibility of requesting advances using the seats obtained in previous elections as a reference.
Thus, according to the amounts set for the 23J elections, the State will pay the parties 18 cents per voter in each of the constituencies in which they have managed to establish their own parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies or in the Senate.
However, the total eligible amount has a maximum that the formations cannot exceed and that varies depending on the previous electoral results.
Initiatives to end mailboxing
Groups such as Podemos and Ciudadanos have repeatedly asked to lower the costs of electoral campaigns with a single shipment to distribute the propaganda of all parties. The oranges included it in 2018 in an electoral reform proposal that did not come to light.
For the moment, each voter can unsubscribe from the electoral propaganda census in a personal capacity on the INE website using a form, although it will no longer be effective for 23J, but for the following elections, since the exclusions are only valid into account up to thirteen days after the call for elections.