“this whole thing was done outside the normal election system.”
Sorry, but that’s an invalid argument since the Madrid regime has said that any vote on independence is illegal.
That said you can’t have the vote in the ‘normal’ system as there is no normal way to do this.
Likewise there is never a legal way to topple a tyrannical government...you just do it.
The Madrid government, for all its flaws (if they had let the referendum proceed, It may not have passed), is a representative, elected, and constitutional government. Catalonia has members in that body. The Catalan government, instead of exhausting constitutional means first, is bound to unilaterally proclaim independence.
Our struggle for independence only really began after the Parliament in London both proclaimed a right to tax the colonies and rejected our right to choose members of Parliament. Even then, the colonial legislatures attempted to redress their grievances within the system. Independence was almost forced on us when Parliament blocked all other alternatives.
We are not at that point in Spain. I fear the Catalan government has miscalculated the strength of their position.