In four days, more than 60,000 teachers in Catalonia cast their vote on whether to endorse the preliminary agreement with Catalonia's Department of Education. Three different unions ran the consultation together with Vocdoni, a voting technology that is secure, verifiable and secret by design.
Ferran
· 6 min read
Unions, federations and member-based movements often face the same structural problem at the worst possible moment: when a high-stakes decision has to go to the membership, it matters to be able to do it with a system that provides maximum integrity, verifiability and privacy. A consultation is only as solid as people's confidence that the result is real.
This is exactly the situation several teachers' unions in Catalonia faced. After months of mobilizations and strikes, a preliminary agreement on salaries and staffing was reached on May 29 with Catalonia's Department of Education (Departament d'Educació). Instead of signing or rejecting it on teachers' behalf, the unions that had called the strikes (USTEC-STEs, CGT and Intersindical) decided to take the preliminary agreement directly to the entire teaching body in a binding consultation.
They ran it with Vocdoni, from June 1 to 4, 2026.
Because the consultation was not limited to members of the convening unions but open to every teacher in Catalonia, several independent union organizations, with different sensibilities and affiliations, had to agree on a shared mechanism to manage a single ballot box. That called for neutral infrastructure, accepted by all parties, able to guarantee the integrity of the process without relying on trust in any one organization.
This makes the requirements especially demanding:
As one of Vocdoni's co-founders explained to NacióDigital: "We run on open source, over a blockchain infrastructure, which means anyone can see how it was done and scrutinize it", while "everyone's data remains private".
Results of the consultation of Catalonia's teachers on the May 29 preliminary agreement
Vocdoni is built precisely for this kind of high-stakes vote, where trust, auditability and speed are non-negotiable.
One of the keys to turnout is making voting simple. The flow was designed to be clear and fast from any device, with no technical knowledge required.
consultaunitaria.vocdoni.vote) with all the information about the process.Throughout the consultation, anyone could see the total census and how many people had voted, updated continuously on a tracking page and a detailed analytics page, but the content of the ballots remained encrypted until the close. This is the property that lets different unions share a single ballot box: verifiability is accessible to all of them at once, to their members, and to society at large.
The co-founder summed it up like this, speaking to NacióDigital: "We are moving from the centralized model of the 2000s, with the ballot box as a 'black box' where you had to blindly trust the good faith of the provider, to a fully verifiable model, open source and with advanced cryptography. Anyone can check that the process is being run correctly."
This week's headline will be the political result. The more lasting part, though, is legitimacy: a consultation like this is a reminder that legitimacy depends not only on the result, but on how it was reached.
For a union, or any other organization, internal democracy is the source of its authority. When a decision is momentous and controversial, the value of consulting the membership is not just the answer; it is that the membership's real opinion becomes known, through a process that supporters and detractors alike can verify. Different unions, with no particular reason to trust one another, were able to stand behind the same tally. Tens of thousands of people took part within a few days. The verdict, whatever it was, is hard to dispute on procedural grounds.
The same pattern applies well beyond the union world: elections in professional bodies, consultations in cooperatives and companies with a broad membership base, internal processes in parties and associations, or assemblies of public institutions and entities. In all of them the challenge is the same: bring the decision to everyone, quickly and at scale, with a result that can be defended.
This is what secure, verifiable online voting offers organizations: a way to take decisions directly to the people they represent, quickly and at scale, strengthening their legitimacy through a closer, more direct relationship with their base, without giving up security, privacy or the credibility of the result.
Catalonia has been a pioneer in digital voting for two decades, and Vocdoni's approach reflects that legacy: we do not build a black box you have to trust us on, but open-source, end-to-end verifiable infrastructure that anyone can audit.
If your union, federation or organization needs to take a decision to its membership, secure online voting can remove the logistical friction without adding technical complexity or compromising trust.
Contact Vocdoni to see how to implement it.
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