Guide

Assembly or election in Argentina with a closed voter roll: how to control entry

By SOMOS DER · October 30, 2026 · 7 min read

To control entry to an assembly or an election with a closed voter roll, there is one rule: whoever is on the roll gets in, and anything the door might have to decide must be decided beforehand. In practice: one QR code per member, issued only to people on the roll, a separate access type for proxies, an exceptions desk for anyone who is not listed, and a live count of how many entered. That count is information for the presiding desk, not the quorum: the quorum is set by law or by the bylaws, and it is not always counted in people.

What changes when there is a voter roll

At most events the guest list is flexible: if someone is missing, you can add them. At a members' assembly, or at the election of officers of a club, a professional association (in Argentina, many professions are organized in a colegio with compulsory membership) or a trade union, you cannot. The roll, called the padrón, is closed, it is approved by a body of the institution (the board of directors or an electoral committee) and the door has no authority to change it. If the operator lets in someone who is not listed, someone can later challenge the assembly.

If you are a foreign agency or a company running a shareholders' or members' meeting for an Argentine entity, keep this in mind: the institution owns the roll and the procedure. Your job, and PASE's, is to make the door match what the institution already decided.

That is why the door of an assembly is designed the opposite way to the door of a party. First the list is closed, then the passes are issued, and on the day the operator only verifies. Anything that involves a decision (dues up to date, proxies, resignations) goes to a separate desk, staffed by someone from the institution with the official roll in hand.

Step 1: issue one pass per member, and only to those on the roll

The roll is held by the institution, not by the system. The simplest method is for the institution to send the registration link only to the members on the roll, from its own email or official channel, and for the form to ask for an ID number or membership number. Each person who registers receives their QR code by email, with the badge in PDF. If a member lives abroad or prefers English, the registration page and the email also work in English.

Before the day, cross-check. Pull the list of registrants from PASE (name, ID, type, when they registered) and compare it against the official roll. Anyone who registered without being on the roll is not dealt with on the sidewalk: it is dealt with that week, talking to the person and to whoever approved the roll. That cross-check is a method, not an automatic feature: PASE does not know your institution's roll, it knows who registered.

Watch out: if the link gets forwarded to a WhatsApp group (WhatsApp is how almost everything circulates in Argentina), anyone can register. That is why the cross-check is not optional.

Step 2: proxies, with their own type and their own desk

At many assemblies people can vote by proxy. In a corporation (sociedad anónima), the General Companies Law, Law 19,550 (article 239), allows shareholders to be represented, but excludes directors, statutory auditors, members of the supervisory council, managers and other employees of the company from acting as proxies, and requires a private document with a certified signature unless the bylaws say otherwise. In a club or a professional association, the bylaws define whether proxies are allowed and how many each person may carry.

At the door, that translates into two things:

• The proxy registers through their own link, as the "proxy" type. In PASE each attendee type has its own link and the person stays in the type of the link, so nobody assigns themselves that category, and the report counts proxies separately.
• The proxy document is not validated by PASE or by the operator. It is validated by the institution's desk, which reads the document and keeps it. The QR code says that the person is accredited as a proxy; whether the proxy is valid is for the desk to say.

Step 3: whoever is not listed goes to the desk, not into an argument

Someone who is not listed always shows up: a member who never registered, another who registered with a mistyped email, one who swears they paid their dues. The door has three cases, and the operator should have them in writing:

1. Has a QR code and is on the roll: the screen shows VALID and they go in. If that QR code was already used, it shows DUPLICATE. And if two scanners read the same code at the same moment at two doors, only one entry is accepted.
2. Is on the roll but has no QR code: the "Recover my pass" page resends the QR code to the email they registered with. If they never registered, they go to the desk, which checks the official roll and, if appropriate, adds them manually from the PASE panel on the spot. The door operator can also search by name, for the member who registered but cannot find the email.
3. Is not on the roll: they go to the desk. The door's answer is no until the desk says otherwise, and the desk decides with the approved roll, not with anyone's memory.

The desk sits to one side, so the queue does not stop for a single case. It works like walk-in registration at the event door, with one difference: here the criterion is not set by the organizer, it is set by the roll.

Step 4: how many entered is not the quorum

This is the most expensive confusion. The PASE live report tells you how many people entered, by type (members, proxies, observers, press), by check-in point and by hour. It helps the desk see the pace at which people are arriving. But it is not the quorum, for two reasons.

First: the quorum is not always counted in heads. In a corporation, article 243 of Law 19,550 requires, on first call, the presence of shareholders representing the majority of the voting shares, and article 244 raises that threshold for an extraordinary assembly. Ten people can represent more votes than a hundred. In a mutual association (mutual, a common nonprofit form in Argentina), on the other hand, the quorum is counted in members: the national government's guide on filing documents for mutual associations describes it as half plus one of the members entitled to take part and, if that is not reached, the assembly may proceed 30 minutes later with those present, with a minimum tied to the number of members of the governing and supervisory bodies. Each institution has its own rule, and its bylaws decide it.

Second: the legal attendance record is a different thing. The same Law 19,550 (article 238) says that those who attend sign the attendance book, with address, ID and number of votes; and the guide for mutual associations asks for a copy of the Assembly Attendance Register to be filed afterwards. PASE does not replace that book, does not run the vote and does not validate the quorum. What it does is make sure the line to sign the book is made of people already verified, and give the desk a reliable number of how many went through the door. If you are new to real attendance versus registrations, the same logic applies here.

One detail: PASE counts entries, not exits. If, in a long assembly, you need to know how many are still in the room at the time of the vote, that is solved by the desk's own count, not by the scanner at the entrance.

Step 5: one-day elections, with time slots

At the election of officers of a club or a professional association, sometimes the problem is not the assembly but the whole roll voting over the course of a day. If the venue is small, stagger arrivals: with PASE time slots, the member chooses a day and time on the registration page, sees how many places are left or that the slot is full, a full slot stops accepting people on its own, and the chosen time travels with the pass, the email and the PDF. Time slots organize arrivals; they are not a voting turn and they do not record any vote.

And since the roll is personal data, ask only for what you need and say what it is for. Argentina's data protection law is covered in our note on attendee data and Law 25,326.

The door verifies, the desk decides and the bylaws count. If each one does only its own job, nobody can challenge the assembly because of the entrance.

Frequently asked questions