Two new cases of alleged electoral fraud have emerged in the middle of the election campaign in Spain this Thursday. One case has appeared in the Canary Islands, where anticorruption prosecutors in Tenerife have started an investigation into alleged irregularities in the processing of postal voting on the island of La Gomera. Sources from the Canary Islands public prosecution service confirmed this to the Efe agency this Thursday. As well, the Civil Guard have arrested 13 people in an operation in Albudeite (Murcia) for alleged purchase of postal votes in the 2023 municipal elections, among them the local PSOE mayoral candidate, Isabel de los Dolores Peñalver.
These cases come on top of another two active cases that in recent days have clouded the Spanish campaign for local and autonomous elections. The first incident was in the city of Melilla, one of Spain's North African enclave cities, which affects the Coalition for Melilla party, and the second in Mojácar (Andalusia), which affects the PSOE. The case of La Gomera has leapt into the Canarian press. The digital daily CanariasAhora has published that anticorruption prosecutors are focusing on the processing by the La Gomera local council of at least twenty digital certificates to allegedly issue postal votes from its offices; in some cases, this media points out, without the people concerned being present.
The Efe agency quotes sources from the La Gomera town hall who indicate that they have no record of the prosecutors' actions and that the administration has been processing digital certificates since 2018 and, once issued, "we don't know what use is made of them". La Gomera has been governed municipally since 1991 by Casimiro Curbelo, first with the PSOE and then with the party he founded in 2015, Agrupació Socialista Gomera (ASG).
In the previous autonomous community elections, the ASG obtained three seats in the Canary Island parliament, which were decisive for the configuration of the four-party pact which has governed the islands for the last four years, in which the ASG joined with the PSOE, Nova Canarias and Sí Podemos Canarias.
13 arrests over postal vote allegations in Murcia
Meanwhile, in Albudeite (Murcia), Civil Guard officers have arrested 13 people, among them the local PSOE mayoral candidate, Isabel de los Dolores Peñalver, and a PSOE candidate for the Assembly of Murcia, Hector Antonio Martínez, in a further case of alleged vote-buying, sources from the Spanish security force informed Europa Press.
The 13 arrested and two under investigation in Albudeite, a town of 1,300 inhabitants, were released after being brought before the courts for their relationship with an alleged vote-buying plot similar to the one in Mojácar (Almería), in which there were also two PSOE candidates arrested.
PSOE finds further cases involving the PP
The Spanish Socialists have been engulfed in controversy due to the two earlier electoral fraud allegations, involving vote-buying, again using postal votes, which affect the PSOE in Melilla and Mojácar as well as these new cases. Now, the Socialists have denounced two further alleged cases of electoral fraud, this time by the People's Party (PP) in the Extramaduran municipality of Casares de las Hurdes and the Andalusian town of Villalba. The PSOE has made a complaint to provincial prosecutors over the deputy mayor of the Extremadura town, number 2 on the local PP list this Sunday's municipal elections, for "coercing" several voters and "withholding postal votes" from two residents. The party has also complained to the courts against the PP and the Villalba del Alcor town council for alleged fraud over postal votes in the Andalusian town.
Spanish voters goes to the polls this Sunday to elect over 8,000 municipal governments all over the state, while elections for autonomous community (regional) governments are also being held on the same day in Aragon, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castilla–La Mancha, Extremadura, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarra, the Valencian Country, and in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla.