Bad practices by Spanish scrutineers on Catalan elections

On November the 25th, more than a thousand people belonging to the Spanish People’s Party arrived from across Spain to ”monitor” the Catalan elections. Their behaviour, however soon filled social networks with comments reporting bad practices.

On this election day, social networks helped to spread irregularities spotted when voting at polling stations. Examples of anomalies detected include: envelopes already containing ballots inside and old ballots from past elections. As videotaped by someone at a polling station in Barcelona, some citizens claimed, to membres presiding the polling station, having found ballots belonging to the People’s Party (PP) inside the envelopes available to voters.

In this video, a woman shows a ballot found inside the ballot envelope, belonging to the party leaded by Alicia Sánchez Camacho. Moreover, there have been images circulating in social networks that claim that scrutineers belonging to the People’s Party had been replacing the ballots belonging to CIU Party (used by voters) by old ballots from the CIU Party from past elections, with the aim to intentionally spoil the ballot, making the vote void.