#12 Bureaucratic barriers to voting from abroad
More than a third of the votes cast by Portuguese citizens abroad in the last elections were declared invalid. It was even more than 50% in the United States or Canada. How could this happen?
I happen to be a Swiss citizen, and even though I live outside my country of birth, I get to vote regularly on a wide variety of topics, some of which I know little about. For instance, I wasn’t sure how to vote on a federal initiative to subsidize cattle growers who choose not to cut the horns off their cows. But I usually do vote, and the process is quite straightforward. I receive a ballot about two months before the day of the vote by regular mail. I cast my vote, sign a paper with my date of birth that I include in the envelope, and send my envelope by regular mail (I have to buy the stamp myself). I live in a European country with a functioning mail service, so my ballot should arrive on time if I send it about one week before the vote. It is much less certain for people living outside Europe who cannot be sure their ballot will arrive on time (I once posted a postcard to my parents from Argentina. It arrived three months later). There are, of course, discussions about electronic voting as the obvious solution to this, but it is not in place so far, notably due to concerns about hacking.
Usually, I feel that I have a say like my fellow Swiss citizens living in Switzerland, with a few strange exceptions. For instance, we have two chambers of parliament, one representing the “people” (the Nationalrat, a bit like the House of Representatives in the US), and one representing the cantons (the Ständerat, a bit like the Senate in the US). Each canton sends two (or one for small cantons) to the latter chamber. Because the mode of election of representatives in that chamber is a cantonal competence, I do not get to vote for the representatives of my canton in that chamber, while I do get to vote for the Nationalrat, because my canton has decided not to enfranchise citizens abroad in cantonal matters (even if in that case it’s to discuss national matters). Strangely, some other cantons do grant voting rights to citizens abroad in elections for that chamber. But I digress. Aside from these details, I do get to participate regularly and the process is reasonably straightforward.
I also happen to have a Portuguese passport. Here, my record of political participation as a citizen abroad is much more patchy. For a long time, I was not on the electoral register because one needed to go specifically to the embassy to register, and my experience of going to the Portuguese Embassy in Geneva to renew my passport was showing up there at 6:30 in the morning amidst a crowd of people hoping to get a spot to be seen before the embassy closed. I think it was only open in the morning. You also had to go there in person to vote and lose a day of work or study. There are only a few consular posts in some countries, sometimes really far. This is why the turnout of the (pretty large) Portuguese diaspora was dismal. In 2015, the turnout of Portuguese abroad in the legislative election was 11%. I am a political scientist by training and am surely more interested in politics than the average citizen, but the costs of voting were too high even for me, most of the time.
Things changed a few years ago when the government decided to automatically enroll all of its citizens abroad on the register. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of registered voters abroad increased from about 250’000 to a million and a half. The number of actual voters based abroad increased from 28’000 in 2015 to 158’000 in 2019. The turnout stayed fairly low, but this still massively increased the size of the diaspora in the total electorate: 1 in 7 registered voters in Portuguese elections now live abroad. Leaving aside the question of whether it is legitimate for people who do not live in a country to vote on its laws and representatives - some countries with large diasporas like Ireland or Israel do not - this was a pretty remarkable “automatic” expansion of democratic rights. Yet, some other problems became apparent, as shown in the graph below.
The graph shows the percentage of votes declared invalid in Portugal and abroad in the last legislative elections held earlier this month. For people voting in Portugal, the proportion of votes declared invalid is quite in line with what one would expect, and probably also in line with what one sees in other countries. You always see a number of people voting for Mickey Mouse, Cristiano Ronaldo, or writing insults on the ballot as a form of protest. Maybe some tick the wrong box somewhere, but in total, this is an extremely small proportion of the vote. However, if you look at people voting from abroad, the proportion becomes staggeringly high. In total, 36.68% of votes cast abroad were declared invalid, as opposed to 1.1% of votes cast inside Portugal. This is actually more than the sum of votes cast abroad for the two largest parties, PSD and Chega. In the United States and Canada, more than half of the votes cast were declared invalid. For all people voting abroad, that’s 122’000 votes. By way of comparison, the difference in votes between the two largest parties in the election, PS and PSD, was 54’000 votes. It is unlikely that votes from abroad would have tilted the result (PS came third after Chega and PSD), but it was nevertheless a staggering and unusual loss of votes.
So what happened? The process for voting from abroad in this election was as follows. As I wrote above, everyone above 18 registered at a consular post was automatically registered to vote. By default, voters were registered for postal mail and could opt in for a vote in person at consular posts until about two months before the election. As expected, most people didn’t do anything and therefore opted tacitly for voting by mail. They would get their ballot by signed mail that they could track on an obscure website hidden somewhere. For the record, mine arrived when I was on holiday, and the postman did not leave a note, so it was sent back and I could not vote. However, what people who actually received their ballot had to do was to include a copy of their ID with their ballot. This seems to have been the administrative step that led to this massive proportion of votes being declared invalid: in most countries, a large proportion of Portuguese citizens did not include a copy. This had already happened in the last election of 2022, and it was even worse: 80% of the votes (!) of Portuguese citizens in Europe outside Portugal were invalidated because ballots with and without copies of ID had been mixed together, invalidating the former.
You might think requiring a copy of an ID for voting isn't overly burdensome, but if such a requirement results in such a significant number of invalid votes, then there's likely an issue with either the process itself or how it's communicated. Personally, I can't assess the communication quality since I didn't receive my ballot, but literature on administrative burdens suggests that steps increasing the cost of democratic participation tend to disproportionately affect marginalized or less educated groups, and therefore that their effects are unequally distributed amongst the population. For example, while there's considerable discussion about welfare abuse, a large portion of entitled welfare benefits go unclaimed due to complex administrative rules, bureaucratic procedures, or poor communication. In Portugal, the high administrative burden associated with voting has, to some extent, offset the significant enfranchisement movement that occurred a few years ago.