Several people were arrested on Tuesday in Melilla, as part of an investigation into suspicion of electoral fraud, a few days before Spanish local elections scheduled for May 28. Moroccan customs had indeed intercepted an electoral fraud operation in Melilla.
Last week, Moroccan customs in Nador intercepted a batch of 80 fraudulent electoral votes from the city of Melilla, which opened the way to a controversy over suspicions of electoral fraud in postal ballots in the presidency. busy.
“The incident occurred at the customs office at the border with Beni Ensar,” said the Iberian media El Espagnol. The voters were a woman who had 36 ballots and a man with 44 hidden votes, according to the same source.
As the Moroccan authorities did not want to meddle in this problem or interfere in the local elections, they contented themselves with pointing out and seizing this find, qualified as “advertising leaflets”. These documents were to be illegally introduced into Morocco by the authors of this network after seeing the tightening of controls in Spain.
This operation, which seemed to be out of the ordinary, is in fact authorized by the Spanish authorities. A person could legally send up to ten ballot papers from different voters to the electoral commissions of Sebta and Melilla.
Since the outbreak of this scandal, the Spanish Electoral Commission has required applicants to vote by mail to present their identity cards.
“A police operation is underway (…) as part of the judicial inquiry into the postal voting affair. Several places were searched in the city and several people were arrested,” the prefecture of Melilla said on Tuesday following an investigation.
According to Spanish media, investigators are looking for a postal voting system targeting families in financial difficulty by offering them between 50 and 200 euros for their vote.
The Spanish authorities began to have suspicions when they evaluated the high rate of postal votes of at least 10% compared to the last elections.
Surfing on this incident and for the purpose of political recovery, the far-right fascist party attacked Morocco accusing it of being behind the buying of votes in Melilla.
No wonder that an extremist and anti-Moroccan party does not see that the problem comes from within, and instead seeks to put the blame on Morocco, when it was the Moroccan authorities who discovered this scandal of purchase of voice.
Following accusations by Vox leader Santiago Abascal, the head of the Vox delegation to the European Parliament, Jorge Buxadé, sent a letter on Monday to the chairman of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference, Raphaël Glucksmann, demanding steps to investigate what he called “interference” by Morocco in local elections in Melilla, Spanish media El Debate reported.
As the far-right party reports in its letter, Vox MEP would denounce that in recent weeks several postal workers have been assaulted in an attempt to obtain electoral documents linked to the postal voting system.