MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s postal service on Thursday requested a half-day extension to the deadline for mail voting ahead of a national election on Sunday, with a record number of people casting ballots by post and a union representative warning Spaniards tend to “leave everything to the last minute”.
Correos, as the state-run service is called, asked for the deadline to be extended to 2 p.m. on Friday, from 10 p.m. on Thursday, for voters to hand over their completed ballots in post offices.
It followed some delays in sending out ballots to voters who registered to vote by post, particularly for those who changed the address where they wanted to receive them, the company said in a statement.
A record 2.5 million Spaniards have requested to vote by post after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called a surprise election for July 23, when many people had already booked summer holidays.
Zaida Llano, union leader for the postal service, said post offices in holiday hotspots were coming under pressure.
“We Spaniards tend to leave everything to the last minute,” Llano said. “There are queues in some tourist areas and fewer people in the centres of the big cities.”
Final opinion polls indicate a tight race, with People’s Party candidate Alberto Nunez Feijoo almost certainly winning most seats but needing to unite with far-right Vox to achieve a majority.
The average of all surveys released on Monday showed PP and Vox getting 140 and 36 seats respectively – exactly the number needed for a majority in the 350-seat parliament.
The postal service has insisted the 20,000 extra staff it hired to cope with the additional workload was enough, even as Feijoo suggested some postal voters might be prevented from casting their ballots due to delays.
Correos had previously said it would keep about a quarter of its 2,389 offices open until 10 p.m. on Thursday.
(Reporting by Corina Pons and Emma Pinedo; Writing by Charlie Devereux; Editing by Aislinn Laing and Alex Richardson)
