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:
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:
There are three basic options for the procedure for external voting:
postal voting;
voting in diplomatic missions or military bases, or other designated places; and
voting
by proxy.
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:
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.
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