There will not be a pool of volunteers to man poll stations, as the president of the Electoral Board of of Barcelona proposed a few days ago, but there will be a reassignment of substitutes. This is the formula that has been chosen to solve the avalanche of allegations that the zone boards have been receiving from people requesting an exemption to their electoral duty to man poll stations. The mechanism that has been established by the Provincial Board of Barcelona (and the one recommended by all the zone boards of the province) will be to relocate the substitutes that have not had to stay at polling stations they were assigned to to others where not enough people turned up. "Preferably" they will be sent to poll stations in the same municipality, but it will be up to the corresponding boards to decide based on their needs. What is discarded is to select the first voters, as the electoral law foresees, taking into account that the Generalitat has recommended that the elderly vote between 9 and 12 a.m.. Barcelona zone board has received more objections than any other: 8.000 out of the over 20.000 that have been received throughout Catalonia.

Over 20,000 people (25% of the total) have requested to be exempted from their electoral duty to man polling stations, according to the latest data from the district electoral boards. This now includes data from, among others, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Tarragona, Lleida and Girona. In Barcelona alone, as of Wednesday, 8,000 requests had already been registered. And this, according to the president of the board, Santiago García, represents a "real problem" in terms of constituting polling stations on 14 February. In two interviews, the first on RAC1's El món and the second on TV3's Planta baixa, García said on Wednesday that, faced with the avalanche of applications, they are even considering looking for "volunteers" to form part of the polling stations. This is also one of the alternatives for other area boards with similar problems. The Catalan Ombudsman has called for this alternative to be ruled out due to its lack of "legal guarantees".

Jordi has not touched his children for a year. They live in the same flat, have adjoining rooms, eat in the same kitchen and rest on the same sofa. They are very close to him, but they feel him very far away. "They see their father every day and can't hug him," explains their mother, Ruth. They wear masks inside the house, eat at different tables, and sometimes even take turns for lunch and dinner. Ruth explains her children are sometimes frightened of meeting their friends, because they know that anything that involves contact with the outside world can be lethal. "If I catch covid-19, it's a death sentence," confesses Jordi, 56. He has been suffering from lung cancer for four years. A strange and rare type, known as neuroendocrine: the cancer is spread throughout the different organs of the body and Jordi has between 12 and 13 tumours. The disease is chronic. Jordi has lost a lot of weight and every effort exhausts him. "He is no longer the same", says Ruth.