I must confess I had quite a lot of fun last week following all the news related to the consultation on the reform of the Avenue Diagonal, one of Barcelona’s main arteries. What was meant to boost the socialist candidature for next municipal elections due in May 2011, turn out to be a week-long nightmare (voters had from Monday to Saturday to cast their vote either physically or electronically) with incidents and troubles flourishing from the very first minute.
Day after day newspapers reported technical problems in the electronic voting system, security breaches that allowed for identity supplantation, advertising campaigns that made options A and B easier to spot than option C (precisely the one Jordi Hereu initially didn’t want to include in the set of options) and, to top it, a scene that will rank high in the annals of cynical politics: the mayor lying to journalists claiming that he had voted when, in fact, he didn’t because the system wasn’t working.
All in all, it’s been a major scandal and a waste of more than 3M €, only to end up with a turn out of 12% and an overwhelming majority of votes for option C (i.e. reject the other options). Plus, it has showed how difficult it is to organize a serious referendum, and paradoxically, it has contributed to give legitimacy and relevance to the grass-roots referendums on the independence of Catalonia that we have celebrated during the last months.
[...] day after the votings have not been seen. Why? There’s an explanation. A couple of weeks ago Barcelona’s Mayor Jordi Hereu organised a referendum about the refurbishing of Avinguda Diagonal, one of Barcelona’s main entrances. Attempting to [...]
I am so with you on the Samaranch issue you expresed in another post, and I am so with you on the Hereu issue, but could you please argue why this would have anything to do with the referendum on independence? Thank you.