The Electoral Board has agreed to extend the term to vote by mail until this Friday at 2:00 p.m. after the Post Office requested it this morning. Initially, the deadline was set for Thursday but, finally, and as a result of the very high number of applications that have registered to vote by mail on 23-J, the deadline has been extended one more day.
The public body has requested this extension to facilitate the management of reissues of electoral documentation to people who indicated a delivery address in their request and who have later requested to receive it in a different one. In addition, citizens who have their electoral documentation available at the post office and have not yet come to collect it will thus have more time to go and collect it and exercise their right to vote.
This Thursday, Correos informed this newspaper that there were 170,000 packages of documentation to be collected, or what is the same: there are 170,000 voters who have requested to vote by mail and who have not been able to be located by the agency in the two attempts that the postmen have to carry out according to the law. Three days ago that figure was 450,000, so Correos appreciates that the collection rate in recent days has been high and has already caught up with other electoral processes.
Correos has faced a huge logistical challenge in these elections because they were called in the summer and during a vacation period for many Spaniards. All records for applications to vote by mail have been broken -2,622,808-, more than double the usual rate, and to respond to the high demand for applicants, Correos has had to reinforce its staff with more than 20,000 workers to guarantee the right to vote for all citizens who have requested to vote through this system.
In addition, this has been an electoral process marked by criticism of Correos, both internal and external.. Internal by the unions, who have denounced an alleged mismanagement of Correos throughout the entire process, and external, by PP and Vox, who have demanded more agility in the distribution of documentation and have made negative statements about “the bosses” of the entity, referring to Juan Manuel Serrano, Pedro Sánchez's former chief of staff, who was appointed president of Correos when the PSOE came to power in 2018.