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Comment by jarofgreen | Hacker News Reader

"In the where to vote? page, you are prompted to enter some of your details: DNI (national id), Birth date, Zip code"

Wait a second, can someone from the area explain this? Why on earth do they need your ID number just to tell you where to vote?

In my country (UK) 99% of the time all you need is a postcode and you can be told your voting place. (I say 99% because there are a few postcodes that are split across different seats and thus different people in the same post code have different polling places. Also just to note some areas are bad at publicly supplying this data. But my general point still stands.)

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For most people that would suffice, but there are exceptions: people who moved recently, people who is not accounted for, etc..

This way, if you are not in the database you know that there's a problem and can ask the authorities to get it fixed before it is too late and you cannot vote.

That's a different question tho - what your talking about is "Am I registered to vote correctly?" and there is no way to answer that without a DB of personal information in some way.

(This could be handled better in the UK - at the recent election there was a website for last minute registrations which got lots of traffic, and afterwards they said a very large amount of people were already registered. But there is no easy system to check if you are already registered .... so everyone just used this site to sign up again.)

BUT

The article talks about answering the question "Where do I vote?". The assumption is the registration is correct, you just want to know where to vote.

In my country, this can be answered by a information system that contains no personal information at all, so I was surprised to see the DOB & ID bit in the original post.

Replying to my own Q to explain why I'm going on about this.

It seems to me the OP set out to answer the question "Where do I vote?".

And they did this by releasing a whole bunch of personal information on every citizen online. That, no matter how good the encryption or how slight the P.I. is, strikes me as a bad idea.

Who's to say that in 6 months a flaw isn't revealed in the encryption method that leaves it all open? Or in a year there isn't a breakthrought in brute forcing and suddenly it's easy to open? And while you could argue the P.I. is slight (DOB, ZIP and ID only) maybe it's actually very powerful to bad people when combined with other data sets?

Basically, if there was any way to create a data set to answer the question "Where do I vote?" without including any Personal Information (like you can in the UK) that is so much better, because then you have an open data set you can pass around freely in as many ways as possible with no fancy crypto needed and no worries about personal information leaking. You could even print the damn thing and put it up in the town square, no fancy tech needed.

ps. Some people are talking about the question of "Am I registered to vote correctly?". That does require Personal Information in a DB, no way around that. But that's not what the original article was about. That very clearly says "Where to vote? ... how is the catalan government supposed to notify people their assigned polling stations?". Being clear about the question really does help sometimes. :-)

Hah! Just read https://www.thespainreport.com/articles/1166-170929190146-go...

"The app, available on Google Play until just before 7 p.m. on Friday, helps people to find their polling station via their address"

I downloaded and checked the app (I'm in the UK and I can).

I don't speak the language, but with a few google translate checks it seems clear that it asks for an address and gives you a polling station. No Id, no DOB needed.

So was it really necessary to release a DB of voters personal information?

You are told your voting place and the specific table inside that place.

> and the specific table inside that place.

Ohhhhhhh, is that the information I'm missing? So you have to know both the building you vote in and the specific table you need to go to?

In the UK, you just turn up at the the right building and there are signs to guide you from there. You don't need to know in advance what table to vote from. (Unless it's changed recently - I've had a postal vote the last 2 elections. Can anyone from the UK confirm?)

That would make the question "Where do I vote?" much harder to answer. In the UK, for 99% of the population it's a simple "My postcode -> building address" lookup table that contains no voter personal information at all. But if Catalan has to have "??? -> building address and which table" that is much harder.

Thank you, that sounds like the answer I was missing then.

But Q: If you only knew the building you had to vote from, and not which table, could you still turn up at the building and be able to vote somehow? Or would they really turn you away?

you can still vote if you know only the building, but it is more cumbersome because you'd have to check your name on the list for each table. I've done it once, and it takes easily more than 2h to find your table (mainly because there is often a lot of people who don't know their table either).

I see. Thank you!

Catalan here.

Your ID is bound to a place to vote based on "where you live" registration. You can't just vote from anywhere.

> You can't just vote from anywhere.

I'm not in any way saying you should be able to. You can't in my country either.

I'm just surprised that you need your ZIP & ID & DO to find out where you vote, because in my country you can find out where you vote with only your ZIP.

yes, you can simply check where to vote based on your zip code. The ID is needed for another, independent, check, to verify whether you are actually on the list of voters for that school.

Yes, I think my root problem here is that people are mixing up "Where do I vote?" and "Am I registered to vote?". These are two very different questions with different solutions! Anyway, thanks for your replies.

But in UK, if you don't fill the form to register for vote in your residence area you are fined.

True, but irrelevant. I'm not talking about voter registration.

I'm talking about simply offering an information service that answers the question "Where do I vote?" - that's what the OP is about - and in the UK, 99% of the time you can answer that with only someone's postcode.

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