Personal verification will also be eliminated, the argument that the PP used with the erroneous vote of Casero in the labor reform

MADRID, 23 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Plenary Session of Congress will begin this Tuesday the debate on a bill signed by all the parliamentary groups to reform the Regulation in order to extend the telematic vote to deputies on official trips and, incidentally, suppress the personal verification that appeared in the rule. Its entry into force is calculated for the month of June.

The initiative, collected by Europa Press, reviews the telematic voting procedure in plenary session that was launched in 2011 for three assessed assumptions: pregnancy, maternity and paternity leave, or cases of serious illness. The coronavirus changed everything and this mechanism became widespread in 2020 and 2021 due to the restrictions and health recommendations derived from the pandemic.

The new wording now extends this option to “exceptional situations of special gravity”, thus covering the assumption of a new pandemic in the future, and also to members of parliamentary delegations who are on an official trip to attend international summits or meetings such as those of the Council of Europe or the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO.

And, incidentally, the voting procedure is simplified by taking advantage of the technological advances of recent years. Thus, the requirement of “personal verification” that was added in the regulation of the telematic vote of 2011 will be eliminated. With the new application of the tablets provided to the deputies, this verification had been done telematically, since in the pandemic it personally call each one of the more than 300 deputies who voted remotely.

Last February, when the telematic vote jumped to the front pages after an error by the deputy Alberto Casero allowed the approval ‘in extremis’ of the labor reform, both the affected parliamentarian and the PP availed themselves of that “personal verification ” which is included in the Regulation to accuse the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, of violating her rights.

Those complaints did not prosper and, months later, all the groups, including the PP, have signed this initiative to eliminate that personal verification.

The bill will be submitted this Tuesday for the full debate and, as all the groups have foreseen, it will be processed by the urgent procedure and in a single reading so that it can be definitively approved two days later, on the same Thursday. In this way, it can be applied from the first plenary session of the month of June, on the 7th, 8th and 9th.