In Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama the offices are ready to begin, next Monday, the reception of elected deputies and senators for the handling of the necessary paperwork: for example the photographs for the website or the fingerprints for the card and for the votes in the classroom . But, almost two weeks after the vote, the names of the 600 elected are still not there, as the national electoral office is still deciding which candidates will take over from those elected in multiple constituencies. 5 deputies and 8 senators are still missing from the appeal.
In Naples, the M5s has fewer candidates than the seats won
The most sensational case is that of the Campania 1 constituency, that is Naples, where M5s, thanks to multiple candidacies, has fewer candidates than the seats won, which puts the machine of the National Electoral Office in crisis. A similar problem had also arisen in 2018 for the Movement in the South, where in all the Regions it obtained consensus that sometimes exceeded 50%. However, there weren’t many multiple candidacies and in the end the problem was solved. This year Giuseppe Conte’s party has made massive use of this possibility granted by the Rosatellum with the result in the Naples district of not having enough candidates and having to recover them from other parts.
The meanders of the algorithm
If you go to the Viminale website (which puts the data transmitted by the National Electoral Office of the Cassation online) and check the Campania 1 district, you will see that M5s has won all seven single-member constituencies and with its 41, 36 % elected six candidates in the proportional. However, several of them were also elected elsewhere: Sergio Costa in the uninominal of Naples Fuorigrotta, Carmela Di Lauro in the uninominal of Somma Vesuviana, Giuseppe Conte in another proportional district. The other three, Raffaele Bruno, Gilda Sportiello and Alessandro Caramiello, will sit in Montecitorio, but three others are missing. The algorithm of the electoral law (article 84 of Presidential Decree 361/1957) provides that in these cases the single-member candidates of the same constituency who have not won, but the Movement has brought all seven of them home, will be recovered; in the alternative one must draw in the proportional of the district «in which the list has the greatest decimal part of the quotient not used».
Similar problems in the House and the Senate
The voters of Naples of M5s will end up getting the candidates of the Movement from other Regions to be elected, but it is not yet known which ones because 21 sections are still being recounted (out of 61,417 in the whole of Italy), and a handful of votes can trigger the quotients in one Region or another. Same problem in the Senate, where M5s are entitled to three elected to the proportional; the leaders Maria Castelloni was elected uninominal (Giugliano), and the fourth to take over, Orfeo Mazzella won the uninominal of Torre del Greco.