Ten minutes late leaves nine votes uncounted

Previously: in Cebrones the ballot ended tied at 87. Nine postal envelopes arrived ten minutes late, bearing the Val de Sanz postmark and the date of the 27th. There are 99 records left and the file reaches the court on the 3rd.

At ten past seven on the morning of 2 December, Lorena Prieto Bada, secretary and comptroller of Cebrones town council, laid out on the school table the 99 records she had left. They were the easy ones. She had kept them for the end on purpose: lifelong neighbours, with a clean page in the population register and the postal-vote box unticked, the kind you close in four minutes. The council occupies the ground floor; upstairs there is no classroom any more.

And underneath the 99, set aside in a plastic wallet, the record she had not touched for three days.

Since the 29th she had known that one of the nine names from Val de Sanz was her father's. She read it out herself in front of Casiano: it was the sixth of the nine names, and she went on reading the other three without changing her voice. She told nobody. In three days she told nobody, and that is something else she is going to have to write down today.

Casiano Nuez, retired schoolmaster and chair of the polling station, arrived at nine with the register printed out and his oilcloth notebook under his arm.

"The fourteen are settled," he said. "And there is no fraud at all."

He laid the two lists side by side. The electoral roll has 212 names; the population register has 198. The fourteen in between were people removed from the Cebrones register over the last six years, some for having moved and four for having died, whose removals had not reached the National Statistics Institute in time, and the Institute is what assembles the roll. The roll was still carrying them. The register was not.

Eight of the nine Val de Sanz envelopes belonged to those fourteen.

"And the ninth is on the register," said Casiano, who had seen it on Monday and had waited three days for her to say it. "The ninth is one of the hundred and ninety-eight. The ninth is on everything."

Amador Prieto Lobato, eighty-seven, born in Cebrones, registered at number 3 Calle de la Fuente. For two years he has lived at the Val de Sanz care home, which is an address of stay and does not change the register unless the person asks. He did not ask. He is where he always was.

At half past ten, what had gone three days without an explanation was settled over the telephone. Jacinta Bel, head of the post office in the district town, rang to say she had found the postmark.

"Val de Sanz was not on my list because my list is for this district," she said. "The service point at the care home hangs off the postal sector of the district next door, which is the way the road climbs. They opened it three years ago for the home and for the four houses still standing. Two mornings a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays."

"And was the 27th a Saturday?"

"The 27th was a Saturday."

Felisa Cuende, an auxiliary at the Val de Sanz care home, came in at eleven unannounced, still in her coat, with a sheet written by hand on both sides. She had caught the quarter past seven bus.

"I filled in the nine applications myself," she said before sitting down. "On the fourteenth, in one afternoon, and I put them in the care home letterbox. If someone has to sign that I did it, I will sign it now."

Lorena explained the difference to her twice, because Felisa was convinced she had done something wrong. The application is a form you request, fill in, hand over, and it stays with the provincial census office. The voting envelope is another thing: it goes by registered post, it is handed in at a counter, and the counter puts its date stamp and a numbered label on it. Filling in the application for nine people who ask you to is not a crime. Signing the envelope for them is.

"And did you sign any of them?"

"Not one. They took them to the counter themselves on the Saturday, in their chairs, those who go in chairs. I pushed two."

She signed the statement at twenty past eleven, in the large handwriting of someone who writes little, and then waited for the bus back in the school corridor, because outside it was three degrees.

At twelve the care home's capacity report came in by email, signed by its director. Of the nine Val de Sanz voters, six need assistance to sign a document. Three do not: three sign unaided and read the newspaper. The report did not say which. It said how many.

Lisardo Vara, rural postman for the area, turned up at one with his cap in his hand and did not wait to be asked.

"The sack from the 27th spent the night with me up in Val de Sanz," he said. "The counter closed at midday and the road was cut by the stream works. I slept at my sister's with the sack beside me, came down on the Sunday morning going round by Quintana, did my round, and handed it over at ten past eight in the evening."

"Did you open it?"

"The sack is sealed, Lorena. What I did was sleep a metre from it, and that is not done either, but I did not open it."

Lorena noted it with the time. Beside it she had, in her own handwriting from voting day, the other note: first sack received at nineteen fifty-five, nine registered envelopes, matching the polling station list. There is no rubber stamp anywhere. There is her handwriting in the record and the time Casiano called out loud in front of two tellers.

Teodoro Sanz, owner of the gravel pit by the river and one of the two candidates tied at 87, arrived at two and asked to speak alone. Lorena told him no, that the file went to court the next day and that he should say it in front of Casiano and Herminia.

Herminia Olmedo, the district vet and the other candidate, had been in the corridor with Felisa for half an hour.

Teodoro took a while to start.

"I withdraw my submission of the 30th."

In that submission he asked for the nine to be opened and counted. Lorena had not understood why: with the tie at 87 intact, the election is decided by lot, and a lot is a coin in the air. The reason, said in the school at a quarter past two on 2 December, was that he had assumed the care home had voted for him and preferred winning by nine to tossing the mayoralty heads or tails.

"And I withdraw it," he said, "because I wrote my mother's envelope myself."

Benilde Sanz Pombo, ninety-one, is one of the nine and one of the six who need assistance to sign. Teodoro went up on the 20th, put the envelope in front of her, read out both ballot papers, put in the one his mother told him to and wrote the address and the sender himself because his mother cannot hold a pen.

"Did she choose the ballot?"

"She chose it. I can swear to it and I cannot prove it. That is why I am withdrawing the submission."

Herminia Olmedo waited until Teodoro had gone and came over to the table. She looked at the nine envelopes without touching them.

"I do not know what is inside and neither do you," she said. "Maybe they give me the mayoralty and maybe they take it away. What I do know is that six of those nine cannot sign unaided. Put it in the record: candidate Olmedo does not ask for them to be opened."

At twenty past seven in the evening one record was left. Lorena had closed the ninety-nine easy ones in twelve hours, four minutes at a time, eating nothing but a sandwich on her feet.

She verified 212 like the other two hundred and eleven, with the register on her left and the roll on her right, and it took her the same as any of them, because there was nothing to argue about. Application in time. Registered envelope with a Val de Sanz date stamp of the 27th and a numbered label. His own signature: Amador is one of the three who sign unaided and read the newspaper.

Of the nine, her father's is the only impeccable one.

She rang the court of first instance in the district town at half past seven and asked for Nieves Arbeloa. She set out the relationship and asked in writing to be relieved of signing.

"Since when have you known?" the judge asked.

"Since the 29th. I read it out myself."

"That is three days, and that goes into the record exactly as you have just said it to me. Is there another qualified secretary within a hundred kilometres and thirteen hours of this reaching my court?"

"No."

"Then you sign. With a marginal note: the relationship, the date you knew, and what you decide. I decide afterwards. You have until eight."

Lorena hung up and stood in front of the eighteen envelopes, the nine from seven fifty-five and the nine from ten past eight.

She could count the nine. She had arguments against eight of them and needed none at all for the ninth. She could also separate that one and count it on its own, and nobody in Cebrones would have said a word, because everyone in the village knows that Amador has voted since 1977 and has not missed one.

What she did was write in the record that the nine envelopes from the second sack were received at twenty hours and ten minutes, ten minutes after the polling station closed, and that for that reason, and for no other, they are not included in the count. She did not put the names. She did not open a single envelope. The nine are recorded by their time of arrival and not by the name of whoever signed them, because the time is the same for all nine and the names are not.

Underneath she wrote the consequence, which is the one the judge will read: the count stands at eighty-seven to eighty-seven, and the mayoralty of Cebrones is decided by lot on the date the court appoints.

In the marginal note she put three lines: that record 212 belongs to her father, that she has known since 29 November and did not say so, and that she is leaving that vote out for the same ten minutes for which she is leaving out the other eight.

She signed at ten past eight in the evening, ten minutes after the deadline the judge had given her, and she noted that too below her signature with the exact date and time, so that whoever read it would have both things in front of them at once: the ten minutes that cost her nothing and the ten minutes that cost nine people their vote.

She wrote the time in the record in large figures, 20:10, and drove up to Val de Sanz to tell her father, out loud and word for word, what the village had voted.