Citizens for Blank Votes (Spanish: Ciudadanos En Blanco) is a Spanish political party.
In Spanish electoral law, a distinction is made between valid votes, blank votes (votos en blanco) and null votes. Blank votes are interpreted as correctly executed votes for "none of the above", and consistently about 2% of votes are blank. Voting "blank" is not the same thing as abstaining, and so it has been argued that blank votes should be recognized as legitimate by apportioning empty seats in representative bodies according to the number of blank votes. Abstainers, the argument continues, exclude themselves from the democratic process and so need not be recognized in this way.
The platform of Ciudadanos En Blanco is that, if elected, their candidates will leave their seats vacant, until such time as the Spanish electoral law is reformed to recognize blank votes in the manner described above. At that point, the party will have no more reason to exist.
The party's slogan is No votes en blanco, vota a Ciudadanos En Blanco (Do not vote "en blanco", vote for Citizens "En Blanco").
Famous quotes containing the words citizens, blank and/or votes:
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank.” This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“I must sojourn once to the ballot-box before I die. I hear the ballot-box is a beautiful glass globe, so you can see all the votes as they go in. Now, the first time I vote I’ll see if the woman’s vote looks any different from the rest—if it makes any stir or commotion. If it don’t inside, it need not outside.”
—Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883)