Four days before the 2023 general elections, Vox sent a letter to the Central Electoral Board warning that the election results could be “altered” due to the “difficulty” they claimed was occurring with postal voting. This planted a trail of doubt that, in this final stretch of the legislature, has shifted from insinuation to assertion. “They are trying to alter the electoral register to win the next elections,” Santiago Abascal declared five months ago, directly pointing at Pedro Sánchez. Since then, this thesis has become a constant in Vox’s discourse, joining a questioning that some of its international partners had already raised. “Sánchez is willing to do anything to steal the next elections,” Abascal repeated yesterday in Barcelona.
His party also embraces this narrative, shielding itself with the fact that the Supreme Court gave wings to their doubts by provisionally suspending the registration in the census of those naturalized under the grandchildren law, the regulation that Vox highlights by insinuating fraud. “We have managed to stop Sánchez’s goal of perpetrating a coup in the next general elections through the adulteration of the census,” claimed the party’s parliamentary spokesperson, Pepa Millán, and Abascal took up the baton the day before yesterday: “A coup d’état, perpetrated by Sánchez and his mafia, against the Spanish people and their sovereignty,” he wrote, in a message that had the grandchildren law as its backdrop.
But, within that framework, Vox’s insinuations have gone beyond this regulation: this week, it extended doubts to the granting of nationality to Sahrawis — “it opens the door to electoral fraud” — and earlier this month accused Sánchez of being “capable of not calling elections” — Abascal insisted yesterday. In June, he had already requested the Central Electoral Board to suspend postal voting from abroad because, in his view, it “does not currently offer a level of guarantees equivalent to that required for postal voting within national territory.” The party questioned everything from the personal identification of the voter to the “integrity of the chain of custody of the electoral documentation.” And, in parallel, Abascal’s party submitted a proposal to Congress to reform the electoral law so that, for example, votes cast by mail are recounted in a separate ballot box from the one collecting in-person ballots.
The shadow of doubt cast by Vox over postal voting inevitably refers to the narrative also defended today by Donald Trump in the USA. His administration requested the implementation of new requirements for this mode of electoral participation ahead of the November midterm elections, although the US Supreme Court blocked his attempt. The Republican had already stirred the specter of electoral fraud, for example, in 2024, when he claimed there were “cheats” in the Pennsylvania elections. Moreover, Trump was slow to acknowledge his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020, leaving room for doubt among the most distrustful.
Another ally of Vox, Jair Bolsonaro, former Brazilian president, also questioned the country’s electronic voting system before Lula da Silva won the 2022 elections — Bolsonaro was later convicted for attempting a coup d’état. Senior officials from the campaign of today’s Argentine president Javier Milei for the 2023 elections made allegations of supposed electoral fraud on the eve of the polls, and former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban opened the door to doubting the result before his defeat this year. The discourse is, therefore, shared in this political space.
