28 | nº 28, pp. 17-36 | doxa.comunicación
January-June of 2019
Public deliberation and participation in the Madrid City Council budgets (2016-2018)
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
the competence of the municipality and does not contravene any regulations. Finally, they analyse their technical feasibility before accepting them.
In the next phase, residents who are registered in Madrid over the age of 16 have the option of supporting up to a maximum of 10 proposals in the entire city, and 10 from a district of their choice.
As in the case of the presentation of proposals, voting can be carried out either through the website or in Citizen Services Offices. Each citizen can vote only once. In order to control this restriction, the National Identity Card (DNI) is requested in the case of face-to-face voting, while for electronic suffrage, the same system we have already mentioned is used for the proposals: a personal verification code.
The third phase of participatory budgeting consists of an evaluation by municipal specialists of the projects that have received the most support. The City Council studies the requirements of legality and viability and the costs of the projects. It also reviews similar ventures and chooses those that have received more support in the case of identical propositions.
Finally, the proposals reach the final vote, and those that have not passed the technical filters are published on the web decide.madrid.es, indicating the reason for their rejection.
Once again, all people registered in Madrid over the age of 16 have the opportunity of selecting projects for the entire city and for a specific district of their choice. The method chosen to collect the votes in this last phase is explained in the following way on the participative budgets website:
Each person may participate in the vote on proposals for the entire city and in the voting of a specific district of their choice. Both voting areas will work in the same way: the budget available in each vote and all proposals with their estimated cost will be published; Furthermore, proposals may be selected until the budget has been consumed (although it is not necessary to deplete it completely) by giving each one a vote.
As we vote on proposals, the bar at the top that shows the amount of budget available will be reduced. We will be allowed to vote on as many proposals as desired as long as we have a budget available (although it will not be necessary to consume the entire budget, and in fact, we can even vote on a single proposal). The proposals voted will be displayed on the sidebar. There we can cancel our votes at any time until the end of the voting phase. If we cancel all votes from the elected district, we can vote in another district. There is no need to confirm the vote at any time.
At the end of the voting period, the proposals for the city as a whole and for each district are arranged by the number of votes obtained. Once this procedure has been completed, the proposals are selected from each list starting from the most-voted until the last one, provided that the total budget allocated to each district or to the city as a whole is not exceeded. In the event that the limit is exceeded when a proposal is included, this proposal will be ignored and we will move on to the next, assuming that there is one.