PESCARA. The outgoing mayor Carlo Masci, a centre-right candidate with 6 lists, exceeded 50% of 588 votes and won the elections on Saturday and Sunday in the first round: Masci finished with 50.95% (31,535 votes). With a memory three pages long, Carlo Costantini, a centre-left candidate with 5 lists who reached 34.24% (21,192 votes), denounces “too many anomalies” and asks for a check on the counts, separate votes and canceled ballots, more than 1,300. It is the centre-left’s last card in pursuing the possibility of a run-off.
LIKE CAMPOBASSO? The centre-left looks at what happened yesterday in Molise: in the municipal elections of Campobasso, due to an error in the loading of separate votes, the victory in the first round of the centre-right candidate was lost Aldo De Benedittisinitially given at 53%: with the correction of the data, there will be a run-off between De Benedittis at 48% and the centre-left candidate Marialuisa Forte at 31. Costantini hopes that the same will happen in Pescara even if, so far, the same error as in Campobasso has not been recorded.
«ABNORMAL DATA» Compared to 63,664 voters from Pescara (turnout at 61.68%), Eligendo’s data say that the valid votes were 61,839 while the ballots considered invalid were 1,311, the blank ones were 453 and 7 were contested. If Masci won only by 588 votes above the 50% threshold, then the center-left tries to rewrite the result. According to the memorandum signed by Andrea Marconi, delegate of Costantini’s two civic lists (Carlo Costantini Mayor of Pescara and Faremo Grande Pescara), there would be “alleged irregularities” in the counting of the ballots, in the attribution of separate votes and in the declarations of nullity. «There are data which, in our opinion, are anomalous», confirms Costantini, «which justify a check. Furthermore, there are sections where there are no separate votes and it could be an error that could impact the result. Let it be clear that we are not accusing anyone: we ask for checks.”
SHEETS UNDER EXAMINATION The brief was presented yesterday during the town hall meeting of the central electoral commission led by the president of the court Angelo Bozza. «The memorandum reports critical issues in a series of sections», explains Costantini, «we have received countless reports from list representatives and, for this reason, we considered it appropriate to request a verification. There are sections that closed at 4 in the morning, in others the list representatives were evacuated, in still others the data is different from that which appeared on the ministerial website Eligendo. Whether all this confusion will be enough to generate a result, we cannot yet know but”, says Costantini, “in the face of Masci’s small victory, we could not avoid requesting this further control”.
ASK FOR THE DOCUMENTS With the memorandum and “contextual request for access to the documents”, Costantini asks to view “the minutes of the operations in the polling stations, the counting tables and copies of the ballots declared void”. «In the document», explains Marconi, «we cited, purely by way of example, specific cases but these alleged irregularities occurred like wildfire throughout the city. In addition to the reports from the list representatives, I myself went around the polling stations”, says Marconi, “I witnessed several unclear situations. In our opinion, these are obvious irregularities: in several cases”, he concludes, “the chairmen of the polling stations did not even respect the guidelines of the Ministry of the Interior”.
