General Elections 2023 | At what time will the first results be known?

MADRID, 22 Jul. (EDITIONS) -

On July 23, general elections are held in Spain. Faced with ballot counts such as the one in Italy -- where they keep counting ballots all night -- or the United States (USA) -- where the count can take several days --, the provisional results in Spain are usually known in a matter of a few hours. When will the results be known on the night of 23J? How do they know each other so quickly?

Throughout election day, the competent authorities --in this case, the Ministry of the Interior-- provide progress on participation. There are usually three: one first thing in the morning, one at lunchtime, and one in the middle of the afternoon. The first serves to detail what happened during the constitution of polling stations -if there has been any notable incident-, the second to give figures on participation during the morning and the third to provide data on participation during the afternoon.

The polling stations always have the same hours: they open at 09:00 and close at 20:00. The first figures of the count are known an hour later, at 9:00 p.m., shortly after the polling stations in the Canary Islands close (where, let us remember, they have an hour difference with the Peninsula due to their time zone). You have a pretty good idea of ​​the day's headlines before midnight: who is the winning party, how many seats each formation gets, etc.

The Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG) obliges the Government to "provide provisional information on the results of the election", something that the Executive faces with the following scrutiny system.

The clock passes 20:00 and the president of the polling station loudly announces the end of the vote. Counting begins once the polling station members and the accredited auditors deposit their ballots and after each polling station puts the mail-in ballots delivered by a postman at 09:00 on election day.

To carry out the recount, the president of the polling station extracts the envelopes from the ballot box one by one, reads aloud the name of each candidacy and shows the ballot to members, intervenors and representatives. After completing the count, doubts and protests are resolved by majority and finally the president announces the result aloud, detailing the number of voters in the census, the number of census certificates provided and the number of voters, invalid votes, blank votes and votes obtained for each candidacy.

These data are made public by means of an act of scrutiny. The representative of the Administration, as well as the representatives of each candidacy, the auditors, the proxies and the candidates who request it receive a copy of it. The representative of the Administration transmits the data to the data aggregation center of the Ministry of the Interior.

Although after this initial count there are hardly any changes, it should be mentioned that the results of election night are provisional (since, for example, the votes of residents abroad that arrive until the same day that the official scrutiny is held have yet to be counted).

The official count itself begins five days after the vote and by law must never end later than the eighth day after the election. In other words, the official count of the elections on July 23 will take place between July 28 and August 1. As regulated in Section 15 of the LOREG, this is a unique and public act.

The competent Electoral Board constitutes a table with the auditors designated by the candidacies that attend the elections. The president introduces the ballot envelopes from residents abroad received up to that day into the ballot box and the secretary writes down the names of the voters on the list. The results will be incorporated into the final scrutiny.

They verify the count and the sum of votes admitted by opening the envelopes with the electoral documentation from each polling station, which include the voting summaries. After carrying out the general scrutiny, the Electoral Board issues an act of scrutiny of the constituency in triplicate.