Overview
- The labour appeals court retrotracted the UTA electoral process on Wednesday and set new national voting dates for December 17–18 after finding the October timetable could not produce a valid vote.
- Judges documented thousands of problematic entries and removals on the padrón, including 2,870 unexplained ‘cessation’ exclusions, over 500 individual additions requested by the governing list and more than 1,000 additional disputed deletions, plus unequal mesa sizes that risked secret voting.
- The court ordered concrete safeguards for the reopened contest: a judicial veedor (Matías Cremonte) with access to records, a 600‑voter maximum per mesa, documentary proof for recent afiliados, mandatory pre‑approval of ballot models and set deadlines for list and mesa steps.
- The ruling reopens opportunities for opposition lists led by Maximiliano Escriba, Alberto Patiño and Claudio Gómez to refile in provinces where they were blocked and leaves local disputes — notably San Luis’s contested padrones and an alleged retaliatory dismissal — pending in federal courts.
- The outcome matters for roughly 70,000 UTA afiliados because the union can halt public transport; a supervised, cleaner vote could shift bargaining power in wage talks and determine who controls a union with major sectoral leverage.