Josep María Bartomeu, Joan Laporta, Agustí Benedito and Toni Freixa are the official candidates for the FC Barcelona presidential elections. The announcement was made by the Electoral Board president, Rafael Herrera, this Wednesday morning.

The electoral board has checked the signatures collected by the pre-candidates and has published the exact number of valid ones, after removing the null and duplicated signatures. “Seguiment FCB” has not advanced to the next electoral stage, because they summed 2,518 valid signatures, just 16 shy of the minimum requested.

Rafael Herrera informed that during the validation process “some little incidents happened” but were resolved “with total normality” between the pre-candidacies and the electoral board members.

“The electoral board regrets that one of the pre-candidacies [Seguiment FCB] was just 16 signatures away from the 2,534 required. We evaluated the signatures three times, with the same result each time”, affirmed Herrera.

The signatures count, after the validation process was completed, is the following:

• Josep María Bartomeu: 9,124 presented signatures; 8,554 valid (6% null).
• Joan Laporta: 4,802 presented signatures; 4,272 valid (11% null).
• Agustí Benedito: 3,815 presented signatures; 3,367 valid (12% null).
• Toni Freixa: 3,289 presented signatures; 3,068 valid (7% null)