Scottish newspaper The National has this Saturday published the first installment of the prohibited survey on the election to the Catalan Parliament to be held next Thursday, 21st December.
The National will update the data every day showing the evolving projection on estimated votes and seats until Wednesday 20th December. However, on the day before the election, it will publish two survey updates: one, like the previous polls, at noon, and a second, a little before midnight.
The Scottish daily offers voters a daily tracking survey prepared by the firm Feedback, on electoral expectations. In the Spanish state, new surveys on the upcoming Catalan election have been prohibited since midnight on Friday night.
This paradoxical situation is the exclusive responsibility of the political parties with parliamentary representation in 2011, when reform of the the electoral law was carried out but no effort was made to adapt it for the new digital era, maintaining the veto on publishing and disseminating electoral surveys during the last days before the election. However, both political parties as well as private companies commission such tracking surveys in order to see the trends during the last week of the campaign, which may be decisive in determining the result at the ballot boxes.
With the daily tracking survey published by The National, this situation has been corrected and the public can now access the information which the elites already see.
The National's proposal is identical to that employed by the daily published by El Periòdic d'Andorra starting in the 2008 Spanish general election. This survey was also published in the Catalan election of 2010, the municipal vote of 2015 in Barcelona, the Spanish elections of 2015 and 2016, and now the 2017 Catalan election to be held on Thursday.