Voting will take place in a single day, Sunday, for both administrative elections and the constitutional referendum. This was confirmed by the government, at the end of the Council of Ministers, with which it was decided to confirm the date of 5 June for the renewal of local authorities. This was announced by Interior Minister Angelino Alfano who had initially proposed extending the vote to Monday: "Faced with so many specious and instrumental controversies - he said - let's leave things as they are".
Alfano specified that even in the constitutional referendum there will be votes only on Sunday and not in two days. In any case, the minister wanted to clarify, dismantling the figures circulated so far, the extra expense for voting even on Monday "would not have been one hundred and twenty million euros, but the increase would have been around five million euros for administrative procedures and about eighteen for the referendum".
Alfano also specified that he had thought about "extending the vote both to the Monday of this administrative round and to that of the referendum consultation, and obviously for all the elections to follow, to meet a request that was represented to me by several parties that is, to broaden participation in the vote and reduce the risk of abstention from the polls. A need which, among other things – he underlined – had been represented to me in the first instance by precisely those opposition parties which, in recent days, have then taken advantage of it to attack the government on alleged present and future fears”. Hence the decision to leave everything unchanged: we will only vote on Sundays.
