Pucherazo

In the Spanish general elections of April 1872 the governmental candidacies won a landslide victory thanks to what was then euphemistically called "the moral influence of the government".

It would seem excused to warn that at the door of each college the authority must have public order agents of heart and energy, who at the slightest pretext will do well to distribute some sticks and to take immediately to the jails those who give reason to do so.

As Feliciano Montero has pointed out, "the king [or in his case the regent] was the one who, in fact, by means of the decree of dissolution of the Cortes, granted to the person designated to form the government, made possible the rise or fall of power to the different political leaders and formations....

It was not the Cortes that provoked political crises and caused governments to change, since each ruling party fabricated a sufficient parliamentary majority for itself through fraudulent elections.

The partial or total ministerial crises, the alternatives in the exercise of power (the turn), were decided among the high political spheres (the elite) outside Parliament, on the basis of the monarchical initiative...".

[2] A similar assessment to that of Feliciano Montero is made by Carmelo Romero Salvador when he states that "what to a greater extent distinguishes the Spanish case... [is] the fact that government action determined that the party that called the elections always won them, and that this was normalized and institutionalized as a result of the pact between the two majority parties that, since 1881 and for more than forty years, decided to alternate in power".

[4] The management of the whole fraud procedure depended on the Ministry of the Interior, which through the civil governors gave the pertinent instructions to the mayors responsible for the electoral census and for organizing the polling stations so that the encasillados candidates would be elected.

The main one, established in article 29, consisted in the fact that in the constituency where only one candidate was presented, he/she was automatically elected, without the need to hold a vote.

The Second Republic took measures to make the elections clean and transparent, such as the figure of the interventor of the party, the provision whereby voters' fingers were marked with indelible ink, etc.

In theory, this provides an additional layer of verification and security to ensure that the data being disseminated matches the actual votes cast at the polls.

The Seville Electoral Board acknowledged the existence of this irregularity, arguing that it had no effect on the validity of the election results and that this lack of verification was standard practice throughout the country.

[13][14][15] However, this lack of verification could open the door to possible errors or manipulations in the vote count, and may be considered a violation of the procedures established by law.

In addition, depending on the circumstances, they may incur other related offenses, such as belonging to a criminal organization or engaging in money laundering activities.

[16] Inflation of the electoral roll refers to the act of artificially increasing the number of persons registered in the census with the right to vote, particularly in periods close to elections.

Caricature from the magazine Blanco y Negro (1898) showing the congressman Trinitario Ruiz y Capdepón coming out of the pot with the votes provided by the cacique network (above left, the cacique is depicted in the form of a spider).
Satirical cartoon of La Carcajada (new masthead of the magazine La Flaca to avoid the administrative suspension) published on April 18, 1872, with the title " Triunfo electoral " (electoral triumph). It ironizes about the fraudulent methods used by the president of the government and Minister of the Interior Práxedes Mateo Sagasta to win the elections of April 1872 . Sagasta leads the procession carried on the back of a funnel with the sign " SUFRAGIO UNIVERSAL " (universal suffrage). He is followed by all those who have made the "electoral triumph" possible: forces of public order, partidas de la porra , lázaros (so called because they are deceased electors who have "resurrected" incarnated by other people), hired assassins, trileros, local authorities, imprisoned peasants and workers taken to vote, etc.
Cover of the satirical weekly Don Placido , of Cartagena , in 1914. It shows a skeleton voting with the subtitle " Un elector de los que hay muchos " (One of many voters), as a denunciation of electoral fraud. It represents the case of the so-called false voters lázaros who took the name of a deceased person who was thus resurrected.