The president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, has responded in writing to the deputy of the PP Ana Pastor, second vice president of the Table, who will not expressly call that lower house body this week to address the tight vote of the labour reform from last Thursday. The decree-law of the coalition government managed to overcome the trance for a error in the telematic vote of a PP deputy, Alberto Casero, since the two parliamentarians from the Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN) broke the agreement reached with the Executive and, finally, turned their backs on the reform.
The PP considers that Batet should have summoned the Table of the Chamber the same Thursday when Casero, seeing that he had made a mistake in the telematic vote, ran to the Carrera de San Jerónimo (he was sick at his home in Madrid) and demanded to return to exercise his right in person. Casero and his fellow party members argue that it was a “computer error” and not a human error. In the second case, which happens regularly every week, the voting is never repeated. In fact, that same deputy was also wrong at other times in that same session: when he said that he did not want the labor reform to be processed as a bill and, in yet another case, when he did not support his own party in a motion that had presented.
The Conservatives have officially requested Batet these last days with several writings that he now convene the Table to analyze “why it was not convened”, something that she has ruled out in writing. He claims that this question will be discussed at the next meeting which, as planned, will take place before the plenary session that will start on February 15. That is: the one that was already planned, since this week, as there are elections in Castilla y León on Sunday, there is no plenary session.
The change with the pandemic
The popular group of the PP has spread the authorization of the General Secretariat of the Congress to Casero for the emission of his vote by the telematic procedure last Thursday, in which it is underlined that it is carried out in the terms of “the resolution of the Table of the Chamber for the development of the telematic voting procedure, of May 21, 2012”.
As he adds, that resolution establishes in its fourth section that “after exercising the vote through the telematic procedure, the Presidency, or body to whom it delegates, will verify by telephone, with the authorized deputy, before the start of the vote face-to-face in plenary, the effective emission of the vote and its meaning”. The PP emphasizes that this verification “was not carried out in the case of the deputy”.
Sources from the Batet team, however, recall that this formula fell into disuse with the pandemic, when telematic voting became widespread and an ‘ad hoc’ application was created to vote remotely in which the deputy can check his vote and correct it. before confirming it. For more than a year and a half, there has been no phone call to confirm anything.