Im|Emigrant Voting on the Rise Worldwide

Since holding a passport comes with full voting rights, dual citizens can usually vote in two countries. As of 2020, there are 141 countries that allow their overseas citizens to vote from abroad. But another group has also gained voting rights: about 50 countries grant certain immigrants political voice in certain elections. International migration combined with changes in nationality and electoral laws are reshaping political communities.

Dual voting on the rise

A century and a half ago, full citizens who could vote comprised only 5% of the population in some countries, since these were landowning men of a certain racial or ethnic background. Since, requirements have loosened. The Migration Policy Institute recently reported that im|emigrant voting has increased globally, albeit with many nuances. Governments dictate the requirements and documents necessary to vote and in which elections (local, national, referendums, and so on). They put high or low barriers to register and vote, including the modes; for example, automatic or online registration and postal voting are easier than multiple in-person trips to an embassy.

For many, to be able to vote in two places arises from bi-, multi-, and supranational agreements. For instance, European Union nationals living in another of the 27 member states of the bloc can vote in local (but not usually in national) elections after a residence period, without having to acquire that citizenship. They can also vote for the European Parliament and often in their origin-country national elections. Similarly, some of the 56 Commonwealth countries allow certain immigrants to vote even in national elections without naturalizing.

International relations and ties, such as shared linguistic and colonial history, also result in special treatment. Agreements can offer easier paths to residence, nationality, and national-level voting rights, such as for Brazilians in Portugal, Irish in the UK, and many South Americans in Spain. The latter also lets non-citizen residents from Cabo Verde, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, and the UK vote in local elections since Spanish nationals can reciprocally vote in those countries. The intertwinement of geopolitics and international migration has created many scenarios of dual voting.

Why states allow migrant voting

Political shifts since the 1990s — such as the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new wave of democratization, and the Maastricht Treaty forming the European Union — have had ripple effects on how states control their territories and citizens. The topic of migrant voting seems controversial to some precisely because it disrupts common understandings that voting rights are bounded by both citizenship and territory. Yet these ideas are malleable.

Countries have routinely changed the rules on who can vote, historically filtering by sex, literacy, minimum age, property ownership, and mental or physical health standards. Im|emigrant voting entails another shift in the ever-changing political community, marked by a changed perception of loyalty. States that allow migrant voting have expanded legally-defined political belonging for immigrants based on territory regardless of citizenship, and for emigrants based on citizenship regardless of territory.

The most inclusive countries for immigrant voting offer universal voting rights in local, intermediate, and national elections, passed in Uruguay in 1934, New Zealand in 1975, Chile in 1980, Malawi in 1994, and Ecuador in 2008. The rights are gained in New Zealand after one year of residence, versus five in Ecuador and Chile, the latter also automatically registers immigrants into the electorate. The expansion trend indicates that voting from abroad — also called overseas voting, external voting, and diaspora voting — has become a global norm. Emigrants and sometimes their descendants can regularly vote in origin-country elections, despite living outside the country. Just as immigrants usually face a minimum residence requirement to gain rights, emigrants sometimes lose voting rights after a maximum time abroad. This was 15 years for British citizens living outside the UK, lifted in January 2024, thus expanding overseas voting.

Why states don’t allow migrant voting

On immigrant voting: many societies and countries still cling to the traditional view that voting rights are reserved for nationals. The rise of populists strengthens often mythical views of a core homogeneous nation, one in which immigrants do not belong, thus blocking immigrant voting. Others based on ethnic, kin, or colonial connections may have already given passports to those considered to be part of the community, removing urgency from debating new immigrant rights.

On external voting: it is also context-specific but overall, withholding the right seems due to domestic politics, political regimes, particular incumbents, and the size of the diaspora. Counter to popular belief, many autocracies hold elections, even though they are not free and competitive, and people participate, even if their vote is not truly counted. So, some autocracies grant or maintain voting rights, such as in present-day Venezuela. Others, such as China, Eritrea, North Korea, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, do not hold elections or do so rarely, and thus do not have external voting. But democracies such as Ireland, Malta, and Uruguay also prohibit external voting. Despite many formal debates, domestic politics and indecisive action maintain the status quo in Uruguay, whereas long-standing ambivalence toward emigrants turned into an exchange in Ireland: voting rights for needed economic investment, but legislative change has failed.

In part, there is fear of the unknown since political parties can only estimate the diaspora’s voting behavior. Calculations of support versus opposition can cause incumbents to grant or reverse external voting rights, even election to election, evidenced across sub-Saharan Africa. Near the end of Mexico’s 71 years rule by PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, they enacted external voting in 1996 but it was symbolic; it was not implemented until 2006 and even after lowering barriers, participation remains low among the large nearby diaspora. Other countries pass external voting but never implement it, such as Nicaragua, or leave it pending for decades, such as Angola, making the right exist only on paper.

Mobility and voting, past and future

Despite its recent global spread, im|emigrant voting is not new. Members of the military and diplomats were voting from abroad in the 19^th century. In the 1890s, New Zealand and Norway let certain citizens vote while at sea. People involved in both World Wars could also vote from abroad back to Canada, France, and the USA. Immigrant voting similarly has a long history. At various points throughout the 1800s, 40 US states allowed noncitizen men to vote, as enacted also in Chile in 1925, albeit rigid policies gave political power to only very few men.

Reports of migrants traveling to vote have appeared in the news, such as when thousands of Irish abroad traveled to vote in Ireland’s referenda: in 2015 on same-sex marriage, and in 2018 — mobilized with #HometoVote on social media — to legalize abortion. Over April to June 2024, among the almost 1 billion people eligible to vote in India’s election, the 13.6 million Non-Resident Indians wanting to participate would have had to be registered and return to India to vote in person. These direct links between international mobility and voting are trends to observe moving forward.