Election countdown

You must take some form of official identification with a photograph, such as a passport, residency card or Spanish driving licence. The white card with blue printing sent by the Electoral Roll, telling you at which table and which polling station to vote, is not enough.

There will three kinds of elections for Spanish nationals on Sunday: local municipal elections with white papers and envelopes; Council of Majorca with blue papers and envelopes; and Parliament with pink/sepia papers and envelopes.

Non-Spanish European Union voters may only vote in the town council elections, although they may have been receiving all the coloured voting papers and programmes for different parties as they are distributed by blanket canvassing by the different parties.

You may choose the white paper and envelope for the party you favour, or may prefer to choose the paper at the polling station.
At the polling station there will be a booth with voting papers where voters may chose the paper in private, plus a table where the papers are available in public view.

Each party has a list of candidates for the total number of seats to be occupied on the local council plus some susbstitutes. The list will show the logo and name of the party followed by a list of names. Voters for the local council elections must chose a white list, without marking it in any way and place it in a white envelope.

The voter then joins a queue of voters who are approaching the voting table where there are three official people, the President and two vocales. The President asks the voter to identify himself/herself and one of the vocales checks the voter's presence on the electoral roll. The second vocal writes the voter's name on a register.

If everything is in order, then the voter may place the envelope in the urn.
At the same time the different parties are allowed to have up to two tellers present to control the process.
If someone wishes to vote without indicating any party, there is the possibility of placing an empty envelope. These empty envelopes are classed as being en blanco. If an envelope contains a marked paper, or two papers of different parties, the vote is clased as ”null and void”.

Voting takes place between 9am and 8pm after which the station is closed and envelopes sent by post are added, then those of the official tellers and official party tellers. Then the urns are opened and the different papers counted.

The public is allowed back into the room to observe that process. The results are then taken to the Town Hall and notiified to the different parties and election authorities.

There are still a few days for the voting by Spanish residents who live abroad and had registered to do so from there. These votes can be decisive in a close tie between different parties. In other cases the final result can be known immediately.

The division of the votes is governed by the Law of Hondt. Full explination can be found on Internet on http://en.wikipedia.org