Some of the causes of this controversy include the formation of a new cabinet before the results were clear, a lack of reliable electoral data, and the overestimation of election fraud in the official narrative that justified the coup d'état.

The uncontested victory of the political left in the elections of 1936 triggered a wave of collectivisation, mainly in the south and west of the Iberian Peninsula, engaging up to three million people,[9] which has been identified as a key cause of the July coup.

After the 1933 election, the Radical Republican Party (RRP) led a series of governments, with Alejandro Lerroux as a moderate Prime Minister.

[13] Since the 1933 elections, farm workers' wages had been halved, and the military purged of republican members and reformed; those loyal to Robles had been promoted.

Posters, however, had a distinctly fascist appeal, showing leader Gil-Robles alongside various autocratic slogans and he allowed his followers to acclaim him with cries of "Jefe!"

[23] Funded by considerable donations from large landowners, industrialists and the Catholic Church – which had suffered under the previous Socialist administration – the Right printed millions of leaflets, promising a 'great Spain'.

[28] The election campaign was heated; the possibility of compromise had been destroyed by the left's Asturian rebellion and its cruel repression by the security forces.

In six provinces left-wing groups apparently interfered with registrations or ballots, augmenting leftist results or invalidating rightist pluralities or majorities.

[32] By the evening, it looked like the Popular Front might win and as a result in some cases crowds broke into prisons to free revolutionaries detained there.

[27][29] Just under 10 million people voted,[27] with an abstention rate of 27-29 per cent, a level of apathy higher than might be suggested by the ongoing political violence.

[33] The elections of 1936 were narrowly won by the Popular Front, with vastly smaller resources than the political right, who followed Nazi propaganda techniques.

[35] It was a comparatively narrow victory in terms of votes, but Paul Preston describes it as a 'triumph of power in the Cortes'[36] – the Popular Front won 267 deputies and the Right only 132, and the imbalance caused by the nature of Spain's electoral system since the 1932 election law came into force.

According to Payne, this augmented the Popular Front's victory into one that gave them control of over two-thirds of the seats, allowing it to amend the constitution as it desired.

[37] Roberto García and Manuel Tardío also argue that the Popular Front manipulated the results,[38] though this has been contested by Eduardo Calleja and Francisco Pérez, who question the charges of electoral irregularity and argue that the Popular Front would still have won a slight electoral majority even if all of the charges were true.

Lerroux's Radicals, incumbent until his government's collapse, were electorally devastated; many of their supporters had been pushed to the right by the increasing instability in Spain.

[34] Worried about the problems of a minority party losing out due to the electoral system, he made a pact with the right, but this was not enough to ensure success.

[34] The Falangist party, under José Antonio Primo de Rivera received only 46,000 votes, a very small fraction of the total cast.

[43] Because, unusually, the first round produced an outright majority of deputies elected on a single list of campaign pledges, the results were treated as granting an unprecedented mandate to the winning coalition: some socialists took to the streets to free political prisoners, without waiting for the government to do so officially; similarly, the caretaker government quickly resigned on the grounds that waiting a month for the parliamentary resumption was now unnecessary.

[44] In the thirty-six hours following the election, sixteen people were killed (mostly by police officers attempting to maintain order or intervene in violent clashes) and thirty-nine were seriously injured, while fifty churches and seventy conservative political centres were attacked or set ablaze.

He did, however, ask prime minister Manuel Portela Valladares to declare a state of war before the revolutionary masses rushed into the streets.

It has been claimed that this was not a coup attempt but more of a "police action" akin to Asturias,[46][24][31] Valladares resigned, even before a new government could be formed.

It does not take into account elections of the second round, which took place in 5 electoral districts (Álava, Castellón, Guipúzcoa, Soria, Vizcaya provincia) on March 1.

[nb 4] The below table is not based on any such data manipulations and summarises number of votes received by individual candidates as recorded by electoral authorities.