Without a call, but with double verification: it is difficult for the telematic vote of Congress to fail

Computer science is like that little brother to whom we know, because he doesn’t raise his voice too much, that we can blame him for almost any prank. It was him, we say, and everyone believes us because they don’t understand him well, he’s young and it’s okay for him to make mistakes. Yesterday, in the Congress of Deputies, the Government succeeded in carrying out the Labor Reform with a single vote of difference, that of the Popular Party deputy Alberto Casero, who said yes to the Executive’s law by telematic vote because, as his party explained, of a computer failure.

Was the fault of the software? The telematic voting system of the Congress of Deputies is based on a double confirmation method designed precisely to reduce possible errors to a minimum. In order to use it, parliamentarians must enter the Lower House intranet with their credentials, search for the initiative to be voted on and click on it. Once this is done, a screen appears with three options, also differentiated by color, depending on the The sixth: yes in green, no in red and abstention in yellow.

Once the vote has been cast, the system takes the deputy to a second screen in which it presents the draft of their vote and asks if they are sure of the vote they have cast. Here, the parliamentarian has to confirm the chosen option or, in the event that he has made a mistake, go back to press the vote that he really wanted to choose. If you continue, a digital certificate with your choice is generated and registered on the Congress intranet.

telephone confirmation. In theory, after the telematic votes are cast and before the face-to-face vote in Congress, the Presidency of the Lower House, in this case headed by Meritxell Batet, must also verify all the votes cast remotely by means of a telephone call with the MP in question according to the rules of the House.

However, since The confidential explain that the implementation of the double verification system of the computer system has made this provision obsolete and remote votes are no longer verified by telephone.

The system has never failed. Parliamentary sources consulted by different media, ensure that the system has been in use for some time, has been used in hundreds of votes (especially during the toughest moments of the pandemic) and there has never been a computer failure. Which, of course, does not mean that it is infallible.

What has occurred on previous occasions are human errors in telematic voting, such as that of former minister José Luis Ábalos in the election of judges Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel, at the proposal of the PP, as candidates for the Constitutional Court. In all these cases it has not been allowed to change the vote.

The deputy had been wrong before. The PP deputy who defends that the system failed to cast his vote, Alberto Casero, had already been wrong on two other occasions before when casting telematic votes: he voted the opposite of all the parliamentarians of his party in the processing as a Bill by the urgent procedure of the Royal Decree on the labor reform and in one of the points of the motion of the PP on the constitutional observance of the legislative program of the Government, According to the Acts of Congress.

Thus, the theory that points to the human error of the popular deputy, who would have been wrong to vote yes to the validation of the labor reform and not to its processing as a bill, wins whole. Validation and bill are different parliamentary processes to approve a regulation.

An important difference. That Alberto Casero and his party defend the software error and deny the human error does not only have to do with the image of the formation, but, above all, with the legal implications of one and the other.

And it is that the Constitutional Court has already dealt with similar cases before in regional parliaments, and has only allowed the approval of the norm to be annulled when it has been shown that, in fact, a computer error mediated the vote that prevented the parliamentarian from exercising his vote correctly, as explained by El Periódico de España. In the case of human error, whether it is committed in person at Congress or electronically, the election is irrevocable.

Image 1 | Sergio R Moreno/GTRES