Nearly 1,800,000 canaries are called to the polls to participate in the general elections of 23J 2023five percent of the 37.4 million Spaniards who appear on the electoral roll. These 1.8 million Canarian residents will elect 15 deputies of the 350 seats that the Congress of Deputies has.
Canary Islands chooses its 15 deputies among the two constituencies that it owns, one for each province. The distribution is proportional to the number of inhabitants. So, to the Las Palmas province corresponds to eight deputies, while the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife he gets seven. In all of Spain there are 52 constituencies, 50 of them correspond to the provinces and the remaining two, to Ceuta and Melilla.
Of the 350 deputies, 102 are fixed by constituency, while the remaining 248 vary depending on the population. For this reason, the province of Badajoz loses a seat for the general elections of 23Jwhile Valencia wins one compared to the previous ones of 2019.
Deputies by province
According to the rules of the two deputies per constituency plus the distribution of the rest by population, Las Palmas sends the same number of politicians to the Congress of Deputies as the Balearic Islands, La Coruña and Vizcaya. For its part, the province of holy cross of Tenerife occupies the same number of seats as Asturias, Granada, Pontevedra and Zaragoza.
Above the Canary provinces are, according to population: Madrid, with 37; Barcelona, 32; Valencia, 15; Alicante and Seville, with 12; Malaga, 11; Murcia, ten and Cádiz, nine.
Below Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife are, according to their population: Almería, Badajoz, Córdoba, Gerona, Guipúzcoa, Tarragona and Toledo, with six; Cantabria, Castellón, Ciudad Real, Huelva, Jaén, Navarra and Valladolid, with five; Álava, Albacete, Burgos, Cáceres, La Rioja, León, Lérida, Lugo, Orense and Salamanca, with four; Ávila, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Huesca, Palencia, Segovia, Teruel and Zamora, with three; Soria, with two; and Ceuta and Melilla, with one each.
D’Hont’s Law
It is clear that Madrid and Barcelona are the cities that contribute the most deputies to Congress, while Soria, the least populated province, is the one that contributes the least, with the minimum corresponding to each province and without adding anything per population. By virtue of the D’Hont Law, a deputy from Madrid is more expensive in votes than one from Soria.
To enter the chamber, a congressman from Madrid will require many more votes than one from Soriano. By the same rule, a deputy from the province of Las Palmas -where there are 898,852 voters- costs more votes than one from the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife -where there are 881,209 voters-.
Curiosities of the electoral census for 23J
According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), Of the 37.4 million people entitled to vote in the 23J general elections, 35.1 million live in Spain, while the remaining 2.3 reside abroad.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with 107,173 voters residing abroad, is one of the provinces with the highest percentage of this type of voter, 12.16%, only behind Zamora, with 12.78%; Asturias, with 12.82%; and from the four Galician provinces: La Coruña and Pontevedra, 15%; Lugo, 20.45%; and Ourense, 28.9%.