The Constitutional Court annulled a vote due to computer problems, but none due to human error

02/04/2022 at 00:51

CET


The difference between human error or technical failure. This seems to be the key to the future of the labor reform pending clarification of the circumstances of the vote of the PP deputy Alberto Caserowhose mistake in the plenary session of Congress this Thursday has allowed carry out ‘in extremis’ the plans of the coalition government.

This is deduced from the existing jurisprudence on this matter Constitutional Court, that in 2006 annulled a vote that took place in the Basque Parliament in which Budgets were discussed. of this community after verifying that an opposition deputy, Irene Novales, you were unable to exercise your right to vote due to an electronic problem. However, this annulment did not cause a vote to be taken again, since at the time of the ruling the budgets had already been executed.

In the Novales case too there were doubts about what happened that day during the vote: If the non-participation of the recurring deputy in the aforementioned vote was due to the fact that the electronic voting system installed in her seat had not worked correctly, as she and her parliamentary group maintained; or on the contrary, as maintained by the legal services of the Chamber, to the lack of due diligence of said deputy, who had not inserted the card in the allotted time to carry out the vote.

Before entering into technical reasoning, the ruling established that, from the information contained in the file, and from the allegations made by the parties, it was deduced “that it has not been possible to prove, irrefutably, that Mrs. Novales committed a error during the development of the vote & rdquor ;. This statement was not shared by one of the magistrates, Vicente Conde, who cast a dissenting opinion.

The vote was not repeated

“Once the period of time granted for the vote had elapsed, the following result appeared on the general electronic panel: parliamentarians present 73; votes in favor of the motion presented 37; votes against 36 and abstentions 0, with which the president of the Chamber approved the particular vote presented”, highlights the sentence on what happened in the Basque chamber to which El Periódico de España, a newspaper of the same group, Prensa Ibérica, as this newspaper, has had access, and which alludes to the approval of the Basque budgets.

Despite confirming the error, the then president of the Basque Parliament, Juan Maria Atutxa, refused to repeat a vote that, with the participation of the socialist, would not have succeeded in carrying out the project of the General Budget Law of the autonomous community for that year. In his ruling, the Constitutional found that the decision of the president of the Basque Parliament “violated” the rights of Novales and the socialist parliamentary group in the exercise of their functions “as parliamentarians in conditions of equality, recognized in the article 23.2 of the Constitution Spanish.

However, the magistrates did not annul the approval of the budgets as it was an already amortized matter, since the legislature in which the events took place had already concluded at the time the ruling was made. The court’s ruling then had a content “exclusively declarative”, limiting itself to granting amparo and recognizing the appellants the right that had been violated.

Deputy negligence

The sentence, with a speech by the then president of the Constitutional Court, Paschal Hallcharged especially against the president of the regional chamber by stating that it was not logical to understand that, in the face of a technical problem, and without being “reliably proven” that it was negligence on the part of Deputy Novales, “the only presidential reaction was the refusal to verify of the anomaly at that time and the repetition, if any, of the disputed vote, with the serious consequences that this implied for the result of the same and for the knowledge of the true will of the House” on such an important issue. The importance of the vote seems to be a common point in both cases, both in 2006 and the one that occurred this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies.

The Constitutional Court also said on that occasion that “it falls on the organs of the Chamber, and especially on its President, the task of proving that the deputy had negligent conductOn the contrary, he pointed out about this parliamentarian that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, it should be said that Novales acted correctly, “among other things because no interest can be assumed in creating a situation in which she and her group were the main losers“.

restrictive interpretation

In general terms, the Constitutional ruling stated that parliamentary bodies should be required to give a “restrictive interpretation” of all those rules that may limit to the exercise of those rights or attributions that make up the “constitutionally relevant status of the public representative“. He also insisted on “the duty to give reasons of its application, under penalty, not only of violating the fundamental right of the representative of the citizens to exercise their position, but also of infringing their right to participate in public affairs”.

In his individual vote, Conde expressed his discrepancy regarding the extension of the amparo granted by his colleagues, not only to the appellant deputy who was unable to participate in the vote, but also to the parliamentary group to which he belonged.



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