The counting of the votes of Portuguese residents abroad began today at the Lisbon Congress Center, where 700 citizens nominated by the political parties have until the end of Wednesday to complete this electoral process.
Fernando Anastácio, spokesman for the National Electoral Commission (CNE), told journalists at the start of the vote count that all the letters with ballot papers received by 5pm next Wednesday will be counted.
The choices of these voters will be scrutinized at around 100 polling stations set up at the Lisbon Congress Centre, explained Fernando Anastácio. Of these, 74 will deal with votes in the Europe constituency and the rest in the Out of Europe constituency.
After the votes have been counted, the general tabulation will take place, with the consequent publication of the election results, which will take place two days later, taking into account the need for a deadline for any complaints.
In this regard, Fernando Anastácio praised the way in which a process on this scale was carried out, involving the sending of more than 1.5 million letters from Portugal.
“There are no perfect processes, but we’re talking about more than 1.5 million letters sent to more than 180 countries around the world,” he said, explaining that “all it takes is a failure to update the address, an error in an accent mark, and the letter is immediately returned.”
“It’s a whole process of improvement. We can look at the small problems, but also at the scale, and here we have a significant increase in Portuguese living abroad who have offered to vote by post,” he said.
Even so, he stressed, the number of returned letters has decreased in these elections compared to the previous legislative elections in 2022.
As of Friday, 299,322 letters with votes from voters living abroad had been received in Portugal, which represents 19.42% of the 1,541,464 voters in the two overseas constituencies: Europe and Outside Europe. In 2022, the percentage of votes received in the same period was 14.49%, according to the Electoral Administration.
