1-O: The Story of a Collaborative Referendum
How an incredible organisation of volunteers and professionals made the Catalan referendum possible.
Today, you can barely understand what’s really going on in Catalonia. Endless Twitter feeds and Facebook posts are quickly colonized by people rushing to express their sentiments from both sides of the conflict.
However, everybody that was part of the Catalan independence referendum will agree that the main reason it was still possible — even after being banned by the Spanish government — was an incredibly well-organized network of volunteers and professionals. These people came from many walks of life, including IT technicians, school principals, politicians, international supporters, and even farmers. People united by the belief that a ban from the constitutional court was not a legitimate way to stop millions of people’s right to vote.
Top-to-bottom organisation
Organization at multiple levels, performed several days in advance, was absolutely key to making sure the referendum went ahead. After the Spanish government’s first measures to stop the referendum, the first thing the Catalan government did was to backup every single thing needed to perform it. The Catalan government quickly realized that it should not reveal all the information that the citizens were expecting to get on a normal referendum. This was privileged information that the Spanish government would use to stop communication between organizers and citizens.
Then the detention of Catalan government representatives came. This was the spark that burned the fire for some citizens. As soon as the first confiscation of 9 million official ballots happened, professional printing companies quickly created an association to repeat the printing multiple times over from several locations in Catalonia. They even uploaded the ballot template as a printable .pdf document.
This was one of the first collective initiatives that gave momentum to the several that came afterwards. It was also the right moment to send a message of consistency and synchronization to the community that wanted to make this referendum to happen. Whatsapp was the main tool to inform about what to do and what not. Here you have some of the messages I received and everybody followed:
- Don’t try to vote with a ballot printed at home, it won’t be valid. (The Catalan president published a video on his Twitter where industrial printers were shown printing around 5 ballots per second just 3 days before the referendum, and after more than 15 million ballots in total were already confiscated)
- Don’t wear or carry independence flags or any kind of flags the day of the voting. International observers will evaluate this as a biased referendum on their reports.
- Passive resistance is the number one principle.
The Spanish government announced that it will prosecute school principals, holding them on account of secession, if they try to open schools and use them as polling stations. The reaction of the principals was interesting: they delivered the keys of the schools to the Catalan government to avoid being detained by the authorities. The education community opened a website to call for volunteers to open schools. Although the site was quickly closed down, I registered and begun receiving information to my email and a Telegram group.
The Spanish government went one step further, declaring that any mayor who had permitted voting in their cities and villages will be taken to court. This was unprecedented. But because justice is slow and the number of pro-referendum mayors sat at around 700, massive detentions were almost impracticable in the short run.
By this time, Spanish police were able not only to close down all the referendum-related websites hosted in Spain (both from official sources and volunteering mirroring), but also to block access to more than 140 URLs from any IP located in Spain throughout the national internet providers. Also students from several universities installed booths on the street with their laptops to help elderly people to check the assigned voting place for them.
Finally, the Catalan information technology and telecommunications center was visited by the Spanish Civil Guard. At this point, polling statistics and vote counting procedures were seriously compromised. Website mirrors had to be transferred to Github static sites set up by volunteers once again. Remarkably, non-tech savvy citizens learned for the first time how to use a proxy to access those sites. Julian Assange and other international supporters educated people on how to circumvent the censorship and monitoring coming from the IT department of the Spanish Civil Guard through VPNs, Tor, peer-to-peer private chat apps and other hi-tech telecommunication methods.
The countdown to 1-O
The day before 1-O (October 1st) arrived. Everybody knew that in order to give the referendum its best chance, measures taken in the digital world had to be accompanied by real world measures (some of which were inspired by the civil war era, when people escaped and hid from Franco’s regime):
Firstly, as official transparent ballot boxes has been confiscated several times, the last resort was to buy plastic boxes. Officially presented just a couple days before the referendum, these looked cheap but were incredibly practical for the exceptional situation. Durable, light, stackable, and with 3 strong zip ties, they were stored temporarily in a small French town until volunteers were given the order to disseminate the boxes using private cars and vans all over Catalonia.
The couriers only had partial information about the delivery route, so we are talking about encryption methods taken to a real world scenario here. If some carriers were caught the rest would continue to deliver the ballot boxes pretty much the same way. You can understand partial segments of an encrypted message, but the whole string is totally meaningless.
Then, the volunteers that offered to open schools and other polling places were told to organize leisure activities for more than 24 hours non-stop, making sure food and drink amenities were available, as local police said that they would appear in some places at 6pm Friday, 2 days before the referendum. We decided to finish the activities on Saturday night, the day before the referendum, closing ourselves inside the schools and polling places. Only one person had the keys, but nobody knew who it was.
More professional associations like firefighters joined the cause to protect voters. Farmers offered their tractors to block entrances, and even the day after the referendum, lots of attorneys volunteered to defend people against the multiple human rights violations that were carried out by the police.
It was a tough day though for the local police, Civil Guard and Spanish police. They had to choose between clashing with voters or disobeying the Spanish constitutional court. The reason why the international press were showing the clash is because the local police of Mossos d’Esquadra chose to not beat the voters, while most police did the opposite. At the end of the day, local police of Mossos d’Esquadra were accused of secessionism and of disobeying orders from the constitutional court — despite being the force that managed to close more polling places than any other police force without beating voters: 40.
Whatsapp was an unbearable place. It was full of fake news, with some unionists trolling organizers by hacking their groups’ names and sending threatening messages. By Saturday night we had switched to Telegram.
A symphony of masterful planning
In the early morning of October 1st, we waited for many hours outside in front of the doors of polling stations to protect them from police confiscation. Before the afternoon, people started to receive horrific images through social media, as well as some fake messages. One of them told us that 50 police vans were approaching our town to try to get an advance surrender. This never came. After being treated by paramedics, people who were beaten up came back to vote in alternate polling stations if their own was closed by the police.
James Bond-worthy distraction maneuvers included the Catalan president’s announcement of the town in which he was planning to vote. Even the organizers loudly told everybody that he had already voted, even though he had never been there. Instead, he travelled in a procession of several cars. The procession stopped beneath a bridge while the Catalan president switched from his own car to another one in order to confuse the helicopter that was chasing him.
Everything was planned like in a philarmonic orchestra. Everyone knew what to do and nobody knew what the others would do. Although one thing was slightly different. The director of the orchestra was not a politician, or one single person — the director of the orchestra was the entire community of voters.
Puigdemont appeared on television announcing that the Spanish government had defeated almost everything the Catalan government had done to achieve a normal referendum. He then said that if the population of Catalonia still wanted the referendum to take place they had to get involved and collaborate in every way they could. So we did!
– Eric Garcia (I’m not a political activist, I’m simply a Catalan citizen that voted and collaborated with a huge network that made the Catalan independence referendum of October 1st 2017 possible.)
