Eduardo González
More than 2.4 million Spaniards residing abroad will be able to participate in the European elections on June 9, according to data from the Census of Absent Resident Voters (CERA) collected by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
Specifically, a total of 38,087,170 Spaniards will be able to vote in the European elections, as stated in the Royal Decree by which the elections are called, signed on April 9 by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and published seven more days. late by the Official State Gazette (BOE).
According to CERA, a total of 2,422,515 Spaniards residing abroad will be able to participate in the elections to the European Parliament. In the lead is the American continent, with a total of 1,498,609 voters, followed by Europe, with 848,760. Asia (36,850 Spanish voters), Oceania (23,546) and Africa (14,750) are far behind.
By country, the list is headed by Argentina, with 440,860 registered in CERA, followed by France, with 245,544. Next are the United States, with 175,769; Cuba, with 159,952; Mexico, with 149,345; Germany, with 146,725; United Kingdom with 140,027; Brazil, with 124,003; Venezuela, with 119,677; and Switzerland, with 110,992 Spanish voters.
These are the first European elections without the so-called “requested vote”, a requirement that obliged Spaniards residing abroad to previously request or beg for a vote to participate in the general, regional or European Parliament elections, fulfilling to do so a series of very short deadlines both for requesting electoral documentation and for sending the vote by postal mail or depositing it in a ballot box.
Such circumstances, together with the time required to gather and print the documentation and the dependence on foreign postal services, made it difficult to comply with the deadlines provided in the electoral regulations and, with it, the exercise of this fundamental right to a number very high number of people, largely because they did not receive the electoral documentation on time or because there were incidents in the subsequent sending of their votes by postal mail to the Consular Offices.
As a consequence, the application of the “requested vote” since January 2011 had resulted in a sharp decline in the participation of those registered in CERA. The system was officially repealed in October 2022 after the entry into force of the law reforming the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG). Spaniards residing abroad will be able to cast their votes in the ballot box between June 1 and 6 at the voting centers established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
