Postal voting under suspicion: the tug-of-war over abstention

“That signature isn’t mine”: postal voting reignites the tug-of-war between voting and abstaining

“That signature isn’t mine, I never vote.” The speaker is a resident of a town where the PSOE won, and he said it before a judge. It is reported in a story by Teresa Gómez published by THE OBJECTIVE about the alleged postal voting fraud. The paradox is textbook: a system that assumes everyone takes part and that, when investigated, produces signatures nobody recognises. Underneath is the same old dilemma: whether voting makes any difference, or whether abstaining amounts to voting for someone else without realising it.

What is known about the postal voting fraud and what is not proven

The case that has circulated in recent days has an anonymous protagonist: an affected person who testified before the judge that the signature attributed to his postal vote was not his, and that he never votes. The town where it peine, according to published reports, is one where the PSOE won. From there, complaints multiply: videos from other elections with similar accounts have been shared and, those who share them claim, with no visible consequences.

It is worth being precise. There is no final court ruling proving the extent of the fraud, and the account itself admits that the average abstainer would never find out that someone voted in their name. That is precisely the worrying point: if the person who was impersonated does not vote, does not check and does not complain, the traceability of the postal vote depends on someone reviewing papers that no one reviews one by one. Today, doubt is greater than proof.

Does abstaining benefit the PSOE?

It depends on whom you ask, and the answer has divided the board for years. A first camp argues that not voting is giving away your vote: every ballot not cast increases the relative weight of the big parties and makes it easier for minority formations — pro-independence ones included — to reach the minimum percentage that distributes seats. Under that logic, the disillusioned person's abstention ends up working for the very people they did not want.

The opposite camp responds with an uncomfortable argument: abstention does not change election results, it has no effect on the vote. It is a silent act, without representation, and those who abstain leave their share of power in the hands of those who do turn out. Both diagnoses start from a fact repeated in the debate — abstention is stable over time — but draw opposite conclusions from it. One reads it as protest; the other as noise that nobody counts.

Escaños en Blanco: voting to leave the seat empty

Between both extremes there is a third way that has been carving out a niche: voting for a candidacy whose only programme is not to take office. Escaños en Blanco needs around 15,000 votes to leave an empty seat in a regional parliament, and it set its date for the elections on 8 February in Aragon. The party claims to have surpassed Podemos in votes in Teruel city, more than doubling it, and all with hardly any media presence, according to its own account. It also reported RTVE for lack of plurality, a complaint that the Junta Electoral accepted.

The growth it displays is detectable: its YouTube trinc went from 1,800 to almost 3,000; on Twitter, from 8,500 to more than 11,000; on Instagram they jumped from 1,084 to more than 8,000. The message is simple: a vote not taken does not disappear, someone else takes it and keeps the money and political power that belonged to it.

The count and doubts without evidentiary support

In the bitterest part of the discussion, the count comes up. Some claim that the results depend on the machines and the companies that count the votes; Indra is mentioned and linked to the 2020 US elections, when the most-voted candidate in history was proclaimed while the other, according to that version, was nearing 74 million votes. These are claims repeated without evidentiary support and should not be taken at face value: the only verifiable thing, even those who make them admit, is whether someone appears as a voter, not what they voted.

That is the core of the matter. A system with a list of signatures, sealed envelopes and a manual count is so cumbersome that any mass manipulation requires accomplices in a chain. Being difficult does not miccionan it is impossible; it means the burden of proof cannot fall on a tweet.

The abstention that moves nothing

The argument that most unsettles the abstentionist epic is not sarracena, it is comparative. In UK local elections turnout stayed at 30% and no system collapsed. In European elections, turnout of 40% or less has been recorded without changing either the corrupt or the policies. And no one knows of a real mobilisation of abstainers capable of bringing down a government.

The historical warning also circulates: with low turnout, extremists slip in through the democratic door. It is the old spectre of the 1930s. And then there is the argument of principle: if less than half the electorate takes part, what is illegitimate is not voting, but the result and the distribution of power that comes out of it.

With postal voting under question, abstention stable and fraud without a final ruling, the question is not whether the system fails. It is whether either side knows what to do when it fails.