The PSOE maintains its 19 deputies and wins the elections in Asturias

The day has been slow and it has been delayed even more after the appearance of a new box when an hour had passed from the start of the count. At around half past five this afternoon, a new box of votes appeared in the room set up in the Oviedo courts, which, during the initial process carried out in the morning (for the classification and introduction of the votes at the polls), had been used to store votes with incidents. The objective was to carry out an exhaustive control of them at the end of the process carried out in the morning but, for reasons that are unknown and that officials present in the room attributed to an oversight due to the volume of people who were in it, those votes were not counted before the count began and, therefore, they were not entered into the corresponding ballot boxes before the count began.

Surprise box

This afternoon, when the count corresponding to the central constituency was coming to an end, a box containing 580 . The tension in the place became evident and the president of the table ordered the media and the public to leave the room “temporarily”. Only the officials and representatives of each party could remain inside. From the corridor, the media were able to verify how the new votes were reviewed and classified and introduced into the corresponding ballot boxes, despite the fact that the count was already quite advanced.

The box contained 580 votes, so there are a total of 7,329 ballots to be counted. Of these, 4,411 correspond to the central district, 1,443 to the western and 1,475 to the eastern. It is the votes of this last section that are more important, since the popular ones are 840 votes away from snatching a deputy from the PSOE, with which both parties would tie at 18.

Half a dozen magistrates and three dozen civil servants have dealt, since early in the morning, with the previous arduous process that involves counting the vote from Asturians residing abroad. Fifteen boxes with thousands of letters arriving from different countries that, once the polling stations have been formally set up, around nine in the morning, are going through several filters before the vote reaches the ballot boxes installed in the electoral board, located in the Oviedo courts. Specifically, there are five voting points assisted by as many magistrates or non-judicial members where the last verification is made and the vote is deposited in the ballot boxes authorized according to the constituency: east, west and center.

Before being deposited in the polls, the thousands of votes that arrived from abroad go through several control areas. In a first point, a group of workers equipped with a guillotine deals with opening the letters in piles for greater agility. These, later, are distributed in three work areas in which the bulk of the officials mobilized for this electoral counting day dealt with a first filter in which it is verified that the documentation provided by each citizen in each envelope is correct. . Like a chain job, and at an intense pace in which the officials were resting in turns, this documentation is transferred to the area where the ballot boxes are installed, where a last check is made before the magistrates or members themselves non-judicial finally introduce the ballot in the corresponding ballot box.

Around 4:30 p.m., the counting of the ballots itself began. In fact, the forecast is that the final result will not be known until well into the afternoon. And everything has been delayed after the appearance of a box full of votes in full count. Only when this process is finished will it be known if the vote from abroad implies substantial changes in the electoral results of last Sunday. That is, 19 deputies from the PSOE, 17 from the PP, 4 Vox, 3 IU-Call for Asturias, one Podemos and one Forum.