Removing the husband's surname from the electoral roll for married or widowed women

The Court of Cassation itself has already clarified the discriminatory significance of the model that identifies the family with the husband's surname, stating that "the historical legislation, in placing the man's surname at the centre of gravity of family identification, has determined a position of evident inequality between spouses". Not even the argument of family unity justifies the censured discipline. In fact, the exercise of the right to vote constitutes, according to the Constitution (Article 48) "a personal, equal, free and secret act with respect to which the social formations to which the individual belongs, including the family, remain extraneous".

Constitutional jurisprudence has done the same. The judge of laws, in a course of interpretation of the regulatory provisions on the surname that began more than thirty years ago, noted that "unity and equality cannot coexist if one denies the other, if unity operates as a limitation that offers a veil of apparent legitimacy to sacrifices imposed in a direction that is only unilateral and that in the face of the evolution of the legal system, the legacy of a discriminatory view, which through the surname reverberates on the identity of each of its components, is no longer tolerable".

In this regulatory framework the organisational purpose of the Pa cannot therefore be valorised - as the Court of First Instance first did and the Court of Appeal later -to deem justify the survival of a clear discrimination for married women voters.

Moreover, a circular of the Ministry of the Interior stated that the husband's surname should only be stated on the voter's card if expressedly requested by the voter. An indication that was justified, according to the administration, 'by the need to ensure the correct and timely identification of the home where the envelope containing the electoral card is to be delivered'. But which, as admitted by the local authority, was no longer justified in the light of the evolution of the historical and social context and of a constitutionally oriented reading of the rules governing the active electorate.

A circular that, despite formally referring to the voter's card alone, cannot fail to apply to the lists as well. "Voter cards and electoral registers, in fact, both constitute instruments designed to identify the voter for the purposes of exercising the right to vote; it follows that it is not consistent that one respects the woman's personal data, while the other continues to convey an automatism based on the assumption of her husband's surname".