European citizens still face administrative hurdles to vote

The EU elections are the world’s second-largest democratic ballot after India. However, compared to other elections, EU citizens face a complicated web of administrative hurdles they need to overcome to be eligible to vote.

While citizens are automatically registered to vote in national elections, things are more complicated when it comes to the European elections, especially for people not living in their country of citizenship.

In most EU countries, these citizens have to register with local authorities to be eligible to vote in their country of residence if they hold citizenship from another EU state – with procedures and deadlines varying from country to country and voters having to register up to 90 days in advance, as is the case in Italy.

EU citizens are eligible to vote either in their country of origin or residence. However, rules on where you are registered as a voter vary.

While EU citizens holding a passport from another country are for instance automatically registered as voters in their country of residence in Germany, other EU states, like Italy, are automatically registering citizens living abroad.

There is thus a complicated web of overlapping competencies of authorities across countries which EU citizens have to navigate before voting.

While there were several attempts to simplify these rules and register EU citizens living in another country automatically, like in the Electoral Law Act, all of them have failed so far due to reservations on the part of the member states.

“It is unacceptable that it is still so difficult for some EU citizens to vote in another EU country,” Damian Boeselager, who spearheaded the European Parliament’s initiative to simplify these rules, told Euractiv.

“We urgently need automated registration and information about the right to vote directly when registering. I would like us to be able to establish common rules here at the European level that apply to everyone,” he added.

But even in countries that automatically register voters holding citizenship from another EU country, like in Germany, the system is running anything but smoothly, with some EU citizens not being entered into the electoral roll.

“There are reports that EU citizens residing in Germany never got their notification to vote and are not automatically registered,” Boeselager, who is the lead candidate of the transnational party Volt, stated.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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