Scottish newspaper The National has this Saturday evening published its final election-eve tracking poll in the prohibited survey for the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia coming up on Sunday, 14th February. It gives last-minute movements on top of an earlier poll released on Saturday afternoon.
Since Tuesday, The National has been updating the data daily with a new projection for seats and percentage of votes every 24 hours, and two installments of the poll on election-eve.
The National's survey of the Catalan parliamentary elections is based on a daily tracking poll on electoral preferences prepared by Feedback. The poll is updated daily with 200 new telephone interviews.
The last poll published before midnight last Monday, February 8th, after which the publication of polls in Spain was prohibited, gave the following result: ERC, with 32 seats, had caught up to the PSC (31-32) and Junts per Catalunya (31-32); Cs won 12 seats, the CUP, 10-11, En Comú Podem, 9, Vox, 6 and the PP, 3. The PDeCat did not obtain representation in the new Parliament.
Legal prohibition in Spain
In the Spanish state it has been illegal to publish pre-election polls starting from Tuesday morning. This paradoxical situation is the sole responsibility of political parties with parliamentary representation, since the electoral law was reformed in 2011 but was not adapted it to the new digital age. The political parties which voted on the law maintained their veto on publishing and disseminating election polls in the last five days before an election.
However, political parties themselves, which are funded with public money, as well as companies, commission these surveys to learn about the trends during the last week of the election campaign, which can be decisive in tipping the scales at the polls. The data is even more necessary in the case of the Catalan elections this coming Sunday, marked by the coronavirus pandemic and a high level of electoral uncertainty.
Figures that the parties already receive
Thus, polls such as the daily tracking surveys published by The National allow the public to access the same information on the latest voting trends for the elections as political and business leaders receive.
The National's proposal is identical to that of the daily polls published by El Periòdic d'Andorra since the Spanish general elections of 2008. These polls - which also offer two installments on the day of reflection, preceding the vote - have been published in the Andorran newspaper in the build-up to the the municipal elections of 2015 and 2019 in Barcelona, the Spanish general elections of 2015, 2016 and 2019, and the Catalan elections of 2010, 2017 and now 2021. The National also provided this information for the Catalan elections of December 21st, 2017 in which there was a close electoral race.
The culmination of the The National's tracking surveys for this Sunday's Catalan elections can be seen in the two polls conducted on Saturday: one during the day, and the other released in the evening, just hours before the voting centres opened.