Vote count

The tallying of the votes is known as the count.

Once the voting is over, the counting of the votes begins at the polling stations.

The counting of the votes is carried out by the Presiding Officer, who removes the envelopes one by one from the corresponding ballot box and reads out the name of the candidacy and shows each ballot paper, once read, to the members, scrutineers and proxies.

At the end of the count, any disputes and/or protests will be resolved by majority vote. The President will then announce the result aloud, specifying the number of voters on the electoral roll, the number of census certificates provided, the number of voters, the number of null votes, the number of abstentions and the number of votes cast for each candidacy.

The polling station publishes the results in the form of a count record, a copy of which will be given to the representatives of each candidature, the auditors, the proxies, the candidates who request one, and the representative of the Administration.

The results are known so quickly because there is a complex and advanced procedure in place for transmitting the information.

At each polling station there is a representative of the Administration who, once the counting of the votes has been completed, receives a copy of the count record from the Presiding Officer with the results from that polling station and sends them to the data aggregation centre at the Ministry of the Interior.

  1. These results, which are announced on election day by the Government of the Nation, abide by the provisions contained in article 98.2 of the LOREG: “The government must provide provisional information on the election results”.
  2. In European Parliament elections, the provisional results may not be announced until the polls have closed in the member State in which the electors have voted last.
  3. The official and definitive count will begin five days after the vote and be carried out by the competent Electoral Boards. The Provincial Electoral Boards perform the count in European Parliament elections.
  4. The official results are those that are published in the Official State Gazette.

Before proceeding to the definitive count, the competent Electoral Board is constituted as a polling station to count the votes of absentees. At eight o’clock in the morning, with the auditors designated by the concurrent candidatures, the Presiding Officer places the envelopes with the absent residents’ votes received until the same day in the ballot box and the Secretary writes down the names of the voters on the list. The Board then counts the votes and incorporates the results into the final tally.

The general or definitive count (art. 103 et seq. LOREG) is carried out on the fifth day following that of the voting by the corresponding Electoral Board. It is a single event which is public in nature.

The Presiding Officer draws up the minutes of the constitution of the Board and signs them together with the members, the Secretary and the people duly accredited as representatives and proxies of the candidatures.

The counting of the votes begins with the Secretary reading out the legal provisions. The envelopes (envelope number 1 with the electoral documentation corresponding to each polling station) which are delivered to the Courts on the day of the elections are then opened.