Correos will hire 5,500 workers to meet the increase in remote voting for the elections

The call for general elections in the middle of the high holiday season will mean testing the postal voting system, which since the day after the announcement of the call by the president, Pedro Sánchez, is registering a greater demand than usual.

Correos, the public company that organizes together with theNational Institute of Statistics (INE) all the logistics of the procedure, does not give figures about the requests it receives to exercise the right through this modality but admits that participation – open in this modality until July 13 – will be much higher than in previous calls. In fact, today it has announced that it will reinforce its workforce – it is the public company with the largest number of workers – with 5,500 more people exclusively to face the workload that comes upon it in the coming weeks.

The company chaired by Juan Manuel Serrano, former chief of staff of President Pedro Sánchez, ensures that with this volume of hiring will be able to cover 100% of the absences for vacations that its staff has scheduled. This is, in any case, much lower than the unions' estimate of almost 10,000 people.

The fact that the candidates are calling on their voters to mobilize from the day of the announcement of the elections added to the fact that many of the registered voters will be away from their habitual residence on July 23 anticipates a higher than usual participation of the vote by mail. To this is added that in the case of votes from abroad, the system has changed from the requested to the Permanent Residents Abroad (CERA).

In calls such as the recent municipal and regional elections, Correos has been able to handle around two million votes. Although there are no official estimates on the activity in the next elections, the INE data on residents outside their homes in the holiday period that runs from July 15 to August 15 indicate that the figure will amount to between 12 and 15 million Spaniards, according to sources of the agency. And according to these same sources a figure higher than 10% would be abroad. Not all of them would be voters because the statistics include minors, for example.

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