The concept of external voting
According
to the definition used in this topic area, external voting is understood as
‘provisions and procedures which enable some or all electors of a country who
are temporarily or permanently outside the country to exercise their voting
rights from outside the territory of the country’.
External
voting must be distinguished from two other types of voting which are easily
confused with it. The first is the franchise for foreigners in a host
country, which is applied for instance within the European Union at municipal
level, allowing people who are not citizens of the host country to vote in
certain elections in that country. This is in effect the opposite of external
voting, and is not covered by this topic area. The second is where some
countries’ electoral laws allow citizens who are resident abroad to vote at
home after entering their homeland. This provision—long applied in Italy—is applied nowadays in some new
democracies in Eastern Europe, such as Albania
or Slovakia.
However, the right of overseas citizens to vote back home is not the same thing
as external voting. The main point is where the overseas elector is when
his or her vote is cast. Since these elections are held exclusively inside
the state territory, this cannot be regarded as an instance of external voting.
Legal
sources for external voting
There are
three major types of source that contain the legal provisions for external
voting:
- constitutions;
- electoral
laws; and
- administrative
regulations.
In reality,
external voting is seldom provided for explicitly in constitutions. Notable
exceptions include Portugal
(article 172 of the constitution) and Spain (article 68/5 of the
constitution). Most countries enable external voting through general provisions
in their electoral laws. Additional regulations on its implementation are also
often set out by legislatures or electoral commissions.
Entitlement
to an external vote and requirements for registration as an external elector
The right
to vote externally may be limited to certain types of election.
The
institutional arrangements for external voting will depend first of all on who
can be registered as an external elector. Various options are possible:
- all
citizens living outside the state territory may be allowed to vote in
national elections;
- certain
legal limitations may determine which citizens can be registered as
external electors;
- citizens
living abroad may have the right to vote if a specified minimum number of
them register with diplomatic missions in the foreign country; and
- the
right to an external vote may be limited in time.
There are
three basic options for the procedure for external voting:
In future,electronic voting will increasingly be another option.
It may be
disputed whether voting by proxy can strictly speaking be treated as a case of
external voting, since the act of voting actually takes place in the
state bases are usually the
sovereign territory of the state in question. However,voting by proxy and voting
in diplomatic missions or military bases are included here types of external
voting because the electors concerned need not enter their home country in
order to vote, but may do so from their place of residence.
These
alternatives should be examined in the context of the fundamental principle of
the free, equal, secret and secure ballot. Proxy voting may be rather
problematic from the perspective of democratic theory because there is no
guarantee that the vote cast by the proxy—and thus possibly even the result of
the election—reflects the will of the original voter. A proxy could use this
procedure to obtain an additional vote and thus infringe the principle of equal
suffrage. Voting in diplomatic missions may deny some external electors the
right to vote if they cannot travel to the polling stations. Voting by mail may
not be as transparent as voting in a diplomatic mission in the presence of
state officials—and voting in a diplomatic mission depends on the perceived
impartiality and integrity of those state officials. There is thus no ‘best
procedure’ for external voting. Much will depend on the context, such as the
infrastructure of those foreign countries where external voting is to be held.
The decision on suitability will depend on the costs and practical aspects of
the different procedures for external voting.
The
assignment of external votes to electoral districts
The last
institutional aspect of external voting is the assignment of external electors
to electoral districts. The institutional provisions for the assignment of
external votes are politically important because they define how external votes
are translated into parliamentary seats. In other words, these regulations will
largely decide the extent to which external voters can influence domestic
politics.
The main
point of reference in the systematic classification of assignment provisions is
the structure of electoral districts. Two basic options may be
distinguished:
- There
are extraterritorial electoral districts for external electors.
- External votes are assigned to
existing electoral districts inside the country, for example, in the
electoral district in which the external elector was last registered.
Each
alternative has its own logic. Whereas the first stresses the special extraterritorial
character of external votes, the second stresses the relation of overseas
citizens to the state territory, and thus reflects the classic legal
requirement of residency. The impact the external vote can have on domestic
politics is different for each alternative. The political influence of external
voters depends not only on the choice between the fundamental alternatives, but
also on the ‘institutional fine-tuning’ within these models. Where there is an
extraterritorial electoral district or districts, the political significance of
external voters is basically determined by the representation attached to those
districts in the institutional framework. This is especially true where
electoral laws establish a fixed number of extraterritorial seats, often
assigned to the world regions where citizens of the country live. The classic
example is Portugal,
where two parliamentary seats are reserved for citizens living abroad, one for
European countries and one for the rest. This institutional arrangement was adopted
by several former Portuguese colonies in Africa (Angola,
Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau).
Croatia
introduced a different extraterritorial model in 1999. The new electoral law
also established separate electoral districts for Croats living abroad. The
number of external seats, however, is not settled a priori but is calculated by
dividing the total number of external votes by the number of votes cast
nationwide to arrive at the Hare quota. In other words, in Croatia the
number of external seats depends on the relation between the actual number of
external voters and the number of in-country valid votes. In comparison with
the ‘Portuguese model’, this institutional framework is more sensitive to the
actual levels of electoral participation and political competition.
In fact few
countries have extraterritorial electoral districts for their overseas
citizens. In most cases, external votes are assigned to domestic electoral
districts and are included in the seat allocation of the respective electoral
district. It is clearly more difficult to appraise the political significance
of external voters in these cases than in arrangements with a fixed number of
extraterritorial seats. Furthermore, institutional variations are also
important in this model. There is a difference between those electoral systems
with one nationwide electoral district and those with sub-national electoral
districts. All else being equal, the political influence of external electors
tends to be greater where sub-national districts are used, because external
votes can be concentrated in some electoral districts and can even make up a
plurality within those districts, although nationwide their share in the total
number of voters may be insignificant. The actual effect will once more depend
on the concrete institutional provisions. If overseas electors are assigned to
electoral districts according to their former place of residence, as happens in
the majority of cases (e.g. in Canada,
Estonia and the UK), a
regional concentration of external votes is unlikely. The political weight of
external votes becomes more significant if they are assigned to the electoral
district or districts of the capital, as in Indonesia,
Kazakhstan, Latvia and Poland. This solution is
administratively simpler: the votes can be collected in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and directly transferred into the domestic electoral district(s).
Politically, however, this option may attract criticism because external votes
could produce an election result in the capital electoral district which
differs from the result that would have happened without the external votes,
even in countries with a relatively small number of citizens living abroad. In
such cases the legitimacy of external voting—and perhaps of democratic
elections as such—may be questioned by domestic public opinion.
Against
this background, the regulation of the 1999 Russian electoral law is a useful
example. First, it assigns external electors to domestic single-member
electoral districts according to their former place of residence; second, it
provides for a maximum quota of citizens abroad (10 per cent of the
registered electors residing in the respective electoral districts). Thus it
reduces the risk of election results being externally determined. Belarus, on the
other hand, offers an unusual and highly dubious arrangement. It assigns
external votes to those electoral districts where the number of registered
electors is lower than the average. In reality, this provision allows the
ruling elite to allocate the external votes arbitrarily according to their own
political advantage. Such a practice, in the absence of strict normative
criteria, will clearly not enhance the transparency and legitimacy of the
electoral process.
Image:
2008 US Election Ballot Envelope with British Stamps by knezovjb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.
