How do you vote null in the general elections?

• General elections in Spain 2023: last minute of the electoral colleges, voting news and polls, today
• Electoral program of the PP | electoral program of the PSOE | Sumar electoral program | Vox electoral program
• Pedro Sanchez | Alberto Núñez Feijóo | Santiago Abascal | Yolanda Diaz

The general elections of this July 23 are just around the corner. Therefore, it is the moment in which the citizens must choose which will be the candidate to take the position of president of the Government during the next four years. However, the number of politicians who run for said position does not always coincide with the number of voting options available to the voter..

These alternatives are just as valid as those of introducing the ballot paper into the envelope by the candidate who is considered suitable.. And it is that disaffection and indifference are legitimate enough reasons to translate them into the results of the polls. One of the types of votes that are most commented on today is the null vote.. This is a way of participating in the electoral process while disagreeing with the government proposals that are being put forward by the different political parties for the next legislature..

In an election, two types of votes are considered valid: the vote for a specific candidacy or the blank vote. To declare a vote void, it must have one of the following characteristics:

• Ballots inserted in the wrong envelopes
• Envelopes containing more than one ballot from different candidacies
• Envelopes with some type of alteration (torn, painted)
• Envelopes containing ballots in which the names or order of the candidates have been added, crossed out or modified, regardless of the reason

Alternatives to null voting

The fact that voting in our country is a right and not a duty means that the data on zero participation in the different electoral processes are not too high.. In the 2019 general elections, VOX wanted a review of the count to be carried out throughout the country after the alleged emergence of a large percentage of thousands of invalid votes, implying that the results could have been falsified.. However, in Spain this option has never had much influence.

The occasion in which the most null votes have been registered was in the municipal elections of the year 2011, with approximately 400,000 rejected ballots, despite the fact that the percentage has never exceeded 1.7% in any case.

A similar alternative to the invalid vote is the blank vote. The main difference of the latter is that it does count for the data, both for participation and for calculating the distribution of seats, since the null has no effect on the outcome of an election. Even so, it is interesting for different sociological studies.