These days many of us are checking that our passport – and our family’s – has not expired before going on holiday. This document does not give us nationality: it only proves the one we already have. But we all know what happens if the day before the trip we can’t find it, it has expired or we haven’t managed to renew it: that, no matter how much we have the right to travel, we won’t get on the plane.Something similar happens with the census. But what we are playing for is not a vacation, but being able to go to the CAP, enroll our sons and daughters in school or access social services. And the census is more than a gateway to these rights. The law defines it as the administrative register of the inhabitants of a municipality. It is the tool with which a town hall knows who lives in its territory. That is why registering in the census is not a favor, but a shared legal obligation: ours, to register where we live; and the town halls', to register all the people who reside there, even initiating the process ex officio if they do not request it.Well then, this second obligation is often not being met. This is shown by an ECAS report, based on a survey we conducted from KSNET with more than fifty social entities: obstacles to registration are not isolated cases. In 40 out of the 60 municipalities analyzed, entities detect significant administrative barriers to registration. None of the 60 agilely applies registration without a fixed address, the route provided for people who cannot prove a stable address, and in 29, some entities indicate that this type of registration is not offered at all. It is not a problem of a specific political color: there are all kinds, including some of those who signed the Pact for Registration in Parliament.Those who are not registered do not disappear. They continue to live in the municipality, taking the bus and getting sick. The only thing that disappears is their existence in the data used to decide how many nursery school places, how many family doctors, or what resources each neighborhood needs. An incomplete registry does not only leave people out of the system; it also draws a municipality that does not exist.And when a mandatory and free procedure becomes a scarce commodity, intermediaries appear. The same day the report was presented, two people were arrested in Badalona for charging between 500 and 1,000 euros for false registrations. The black market is not an anomaly of the system: it is a consequence of it. And as long as the application of the register continues to depend on the discretion of each municipality, it will continue to exist.When we lose our passport, those left behind are us. When someone cannot register, the municipality also loses out: it stops knowing who lives there and, therefore, what they need. Public services planned for fewer people than actually live there end up affecting us all, both those who work there and those who use them. No exceptional treatment or legal reform is needed: only that the law be applied. Because counting the population correctly is not just another administrative procedure. Governing well begins with knowing who you govern.
