Santander (EFE)
This number represents 93.8 percent of the requests, waiting to count the postal vote that can still be delivered until 2:00 p.m. today, when the deadline ends.
In a statement, Correos emphasizes that pending the final data, this number of postal votes already represents the highest number of postal votes recorded in the history of Spanish democracy, which “demonstrates the success in the management of postal voting”.
However, the number of electoral documents that were still not collected by citizens when the offices opened was 123,822.
The total number of requests amounts to 2.62 million requests, so that until midnight yesterday, 161,524 votes remained to be cast.
On the other hand, the percentage of votes cast, which represents 93.8% of those requested, represents the highest ratio reached in a general election since 2008, the first year with approved statistical records, while it also exceeds the record set in 2016, when 1.35 million postal votes were cast.
Compared to the last general elections in November 2019, when 924,403 voters cast their votes by post, the increase has been almost triple, 166%.
With the current data, close to 6% of the requested votes would still remain to be cast, although this percentage is well below that which remained pending in previous elections, which amounts to an average of 7.3%.
The Mediterranean autonomies register less votes by mail than Madrid and the Basque Country
Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community and Murcia are the autonomies with the lowest votes by mail issued in relation to their population, while the Basque Country and Madrid reach the highest levels.
The postal votes cast so far throughout the country are 2,461,284, a figure that is not distributed evenly in the different autonomous communities, which show differences between them that go beyond what is expected based on their population.
Thus, it should be noted that while the population of the Community of Madrid represents 14% of the Spanish total; and that of the Basque Country, 5%, the percentage of registered postal votes in both is well above what would be expected based on this first data: it is 24% in Madrid and 10% in the Basque Country.
On the contrary, the Catalan population represents slightly more than 16% of the national total, while the citizens of that autonomy who, at 12 midnight yesterday, had sent their vote by mail for the General Elections on Sunday is around 10% of the global.
Something similar has happened in the Valencian Community. Its population represents more than 10% of the national total, while Valencians who have voted by mail represent 6.8% of the total. The same has happened in the Balearic Islands (with respective figures of 2.5% and 1.4%) or in Murcia (3.2% and 1.9%).
In short, it can be said that there has been a lower participation in voting by mail in communities on the Mediterranean coast, and higher in Madrid and the Basque Country, while the vast majority, including Andalusia, show more approximate figures between their percentage of population out of the total number of Spaniards and those who have voted by mail.
The entry More than 22,000 voters in Cantabria have voted by mail was first published in EFE Noticias.