The PSOE denounces a PP City Council in Huelva for supplanting the digital signature of its neighbors to use their vote by mail

The Andalusian PSOE has filed a complaint against the PP and against the Town Hall of the Huelva municipality of Villalba del Alcor (3,200 inhabitants) in the Investigating Court of La Palma del Condado (Huelva) for an alleged electoral crime, punishable by six-month sentences to two years and a fine of six to 24 months.

Villalba del Alcor has a PP mayor, Diego del Toro, who is running for re-election next Sunday. The Socialists won in votes in the municipal elections four years ago, but they tied five councilors with the PP, which ended up tying the Mayor’s Office thanks to the support of the only councilor that Foro Ciudadano obtained from Villalba.

The PSOE has denounced a “fraud” in the vote by mail in Villalba del Alcor based on two circumstances: first, that the City Council, at the request of the PP, has processed from its own computers at least fifty requests for voting by mail, using the electronic signature of your neighbors “without their permission”. They accuse the Consistory of being “managing directly from municipal offices, so on lineapplications for votes by mail from residents of the municipality, proceeding to electronically sign the petitions from the City Hall computers” [el PSOE conoce la dirección de internet de esos ordenadores (IP) porque gobernó antes que el PP en el municipio].

And second, that all the applications for voting by mail were then sent to two postal addresses in a neighboring town also governed by the PP -La Palma del Condado-, and these two addresses correspond to the address of a popular councilor and that of the father of a former councilor of the PP, according to sources from the PSOE of Huelva.

The Socialists have registered this Wednesday by electronic means a complaint before the duty court that they already presented two weeks ago before the Electoral Board of the Zone (JEZ) of La Palma, and which is still under investigation. On May 10, the PSOE filed a complaint with the JEZ against the PP and the Villalba del Alcor City Council, and included in its letter the two exact addresses in La Palma del Condado where applications to vote by mail of almost 50 residents of Villalba -about 10 kilometers from La Palma-, apparently without their knowledge.

On May 11, the Zone Electoral Board sent a request to the La Palma Post Office to corroborate the PSOE’s complaint and clarify “how many vote-by-mail procedures they had managed” at the two addresses indicated. The Correos response to the JEZ arrived on May 19, confirming that until that same day the electoral documentation had been sent to carry out 46 votes by mail to the same two postal addresses in La Palma that appeared in the PSOE complaint: Ronda de the Legionaries, 67 (received 25 vote requests) and Virgen del Valle street, 82 (21 votes).

“Let the Civil Guard proceed”

The Socialists denounce that the first address corresponds to the habitual residence of the PP councilor José María Lepe (where his mother now lives); and the second address belongs to Antonio Martínez, father of the former popular councilor Ángela Martínez Pino. This newspaper has contacted the Huelva PP to confirm both ends, without obtaining a response.

The PSOE’s complaint provoked a first reaction from the Electoral Board, which immediately sent a “provisional” request to the Villalba City Council to “refrain from making more requests for votes by mail” until they clarified what was happening, threatening to “initiate disciplinary files if its connection with the terms” of the complaint for electoral fraud of the Socialists is proven.

On May 16, the Socialists sent another letter to the Zone Electoral Board asking it to “cancel” suspected mail-in votes in the Huelva municipality and to order the opening of an investigation by the Civil Guard’s Economic and Technological Crimes Team. , facilitating the IP of the Villalba City Council to clarify the facts“. “We have been aware of cases [de vecinos] that they had not even informed of the request to vote by mail, but rather they have requested the vote without their knowledge or the certificate has been processed on a City Hall computer without being aware of it. It is curious that all these certificates have the same pin 060673“, reads the letter.

The allegations of the PP

On May 13, the PP of La Palma filed an appeal alleging that “there is no infringement of the Electoral Law in designating one address or another” to which to send the documentation to vote by mail. The popular ones justified the sending of the applications to vote by mail to the two postal addresses of La Palma in the fact that “the Villalba Post Office is only open two hours in the morning”.

“The residents of Villalba who want to vote by mail and are working or cannot go to their post office in those few hours that it opens have decided to designate another address in that municipality (La Palma) that does serve the public in the afternoon” , warn the popular, after recalling that in April they already requested in writing to the Provincial Electoral Board to “enable afternoon hours in those municipalities of Huelva in which the Post Offices did not open in the afternoons.”

The PSOE questioned this explanation in a post-JEZ letter, because La Palma (a municipality with 10,700 inhabitants) is at the same distance from Villalba as Bollullos par del Condado (a town with 14,000 residents), “however, curiously the first it is also governed by the PP and the latter has an absolute majority, the PSOE, and both are practically at the same distance”.

After the arrests in Mojácar

The Andalusian PSOE’s complaint was registered in the ex officio court this Wednesday afternoon, hours after the Civil Guard arrested seven people in Mojácar (Almería) in an operation against buying votes for this year’s elections. Sunday, including two members of the PSOE list who do not hold public office.

Sources from the PSOE in Huelva speak directly of a “plot organized to buy votes in exchange for subsidies from the Villalba del Alcor City Council.” He mode of operation that they have denounced before the courts would be the following: the Consistory asks its neighbors for the DNI to manage economic social assistance; With these data, the Consistory requests the digital signature of these neighbors without their consent; With the digital signature, the vote by mail is requested electronically, asking that the necessary documentation be sent to one of the two addresses in La Palma del Condado. The documentation of 46 neighbors arrived at those two addresses, not at their actual residence in Villalba. When they were not present, the postmen returned the envelope to the La Palma Post Office, from where the alleged perpetrators of the plot collected them.

The same socialist sources indicate that the matter was uncovered when one of the residents of Villalba realized that his digital signature had been supplanted, he decided to request a new one and with it he went to the La Palma Post Office to personally collect the envelope. to vote by mail.

Lastly, the PSOE warned that voting by mail in Villalba del Alcor would reach “at least 30% of the total vote, twice as much as in the last elections which, like these, coincided with El Rocío, since there are more than 700 votes cast by post and in said municipality there were 2,268 votes then. “It may be that the action being carried out by the City Council is generating electoral fraud, taking into account that between 200 and 300 votes have been carried out from there,” he concludes.

The body in charge of ensuring compliance with the law before the municipal elections on May 28 has not yet ruled, so the PSOE has chosen to submit the same complaint to the courts.