I don't understand how people can keep repeating this? With out citing specific data? Based on wikipeida's article on election data in the 2008 the average voter turnout was 73.9% of the population. During the Catalan referendum some were between 38.5% and 42.5% percent turnout. For simplicity lets say 100 people voted in the referendum which resulted in a 90/10 split in favor of independence. The turnout numbers suggest that in an a normal election maybe as much as 192 people might have voted or 92 more then did. Even if you assume %90 of the "likely" voters that did not vote would have voted against independence it seems to me that the independence side would have still won.
1. One would think there is a big correlation between people that think that the referendum was not valid, and people who did not vote.
2. Ballots were only overseen by proindependence people, and questions regarding tampering have been raised. A small number of radicals* should suffice to widen the gap with a normal voting process.
* I define "radical" here as someone that seems justifiable to create fake vote or vote multiple times, gaming the election process, for the "greater good"
