When events don't toe the line

Last weekend, we were mildly impressed by the quaintly devious fashion in which The Guardian once again contrived to keep their Hispanic heartthrob, Francisco Franco, alive and well in the hearts of their readership. Referring to a historical police-conducted burning of a Casas Viejas farmhouse occupied by 120 (if we remember) anarchists:

Even in Benalup (same place, ed.), where the Socialists once won 90% of the vote and which still remembers the bloody suppression of an uprising by local anarchists in the 1930s, the vote is now sliding to the right.

Readers could be forgiven for thinking the obvious (and The Guardian is obviously counting on it), given the juxtaposition of the decade, modern voting preferences and 'bloody suppression'. In fact, the year was 1933... and the government at the time, headed by the republican Alcalá-Zamora, was most assuredly of the left.

But that's nothing compared to the pile of garbage that appeared in today's edition in which Sunday's massive PP election victory is interpreted as a clear victory for the Spanish precursors of the Occupy Wall Street movement - the indignados. Here's the clincher:

...the number of spoiled ballots on Sunday was double that of the last election in 2008 – numbering, with abstentions and blank votes, 11 million: more than voted for the rightwing victors,...

Unless our command of English grammar has suddenly failed us, the unfortunate halfwit that wrote the piece, Katharine Ainger, is actually saying that 'spoiled ballots' numbered 11 million.

Actual election results, (with 2008 numbers in parentheses) are as follows:

Participation - 71.7% (73.85%)
Abstentions - 9,710,775 (9,172,740)
Destroyed ballots - 317,866 (165,576)
Blank votes - 333,095 (286,182)
Partido Popular - 10,830,693 (10,278,010)
PSOE - 6,973,880 (11,289,335)

An alternate interpretation might suggest that turnout was impressively high for an election the results of which had been a foregone conclusion for months.

Hat tips to Trevor (with a chart of historical voting patterns in Spain that gives him tenure at Ibex Salad) and David Jackson.

Election statistics from Wikipedia - 2008 & 2011.

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