I am five million and cannot vote: non-resident, also on the occasion of the next political vote 09/25, can only express their preferences when they return to their place of residence. This expands the trend of abstentions: the voluntary – which according to all polls was the winner of the seats – is followed by the latter, involuntary, “forced”. In the coming weeks, calls for everyone to participate will multiply. But even for this legislative period, all proposals to remedy the situation have remained dead letters. Despite the constant appeals and despite the tens of thousands of signatures on the petition “I am voting out of office”, the Parliament of the XVIII. Legislature not obliged to pass a law in this regard. A unique case in Europe: Italy is the only country (besides Malta and Cyprus) that does not allow remote voting.
A law in six months – To prevent the problem from spreading further, the non-profit The good lobby (along with the I Voting Out of Office Committee) wrote to all party secretaries to call for a public commitment to pass remote voting legislation within the first six months of the new Parliament’s inauguration: “The solutions to this decade-old problem that they are, they exist,” he says Federico Anghele, Director of the Good Lobby. “The White Paper On Civic Participation: how to reduce abstentions and facilitate voting, presented in April, provides comprehensive and proportionate proposals to effectively solve the problem.” So what was missing? “The political will. With our motion, we hope that the next legislature will commit to achieving this fundamental goal of our democracy and thus comply with the motion of almost 5 million “involuntary abstentions”, the offsites, who have been consistently denied the right to vote for years. “. The organization has always been committed to the issue: on June 10, it submitted a summons to the Ministry of the Interior and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers for violating the right to vote of field workers and students. The case concerned Genoa, where, according to The Good Lobby, in a note more than 18,000 in the administrative offices were not allowed to vote.
Failed Attempts – The commission set up by the (former) Pentastellato Ministry for Relations with Parliament tried it in April Federico D’Inca, coordinated by Professor Franco Bassanini. Two broad categories of abstentions were identified: i 4.9 million from office and 4.2 million seniors With mobility difficulties. The proposal was based on replacing the traditional paper ballot with a digital ballot, an “electoral passport” to be used according to “the technology that has been tried and tested with the Green Passport”. The premise of the innovation, said D’Incà himself, “is the integration of the electoral lists in the national register of the resident population (Anpr), already foreseen by a provision of the Legislative Decree “Simplifications bis”. The idea was to download it to your smartphone (or print it out on paper) and then check it in real time at the polling station via the app. Thanks to the latter, it would have been possible to identify the residential polling station of the person concerned. The same app would then have made it possible to print out the ballots on the spot and send them to the place of residence. In addition, with this system, disabled seniors could choose barrier-free seats. They also wanted to allow voting – on election day – in all those ballot boxes that are in the same constituency or constituency. Finally, among the proposals, there were those Concentration of election dates (two, no more).
The Good Lobby had welcomed the idea, as the organization said in a statement: “A reversal of the perspective that had previously accompanied every proposal in this area, and which stipulated that only certain categories of citizens had to justify their request for remote voting. This solution would also make it possible to overcome the electoral compensation system, allowing significant savings for the state treasury. A discussion of the law was expected in May, but nothing came of it. A similar issue occurred in 2021, with the no. of Ministry of the Interior on proposals for local and regional authorities. The reason was to be found in technical problems”insurmountable“Which prevented parliamentary approval. Vittoria Baldino, head of the M5S group in the Constitutional Affairs Commission, recalled in April how useful e-voting would have been: “Supported with an allocation of one million euros but further developed, it would instead have been a fundamental step on the Innovation and digitization of voting processes can represent the way, with the aim of facilitating the participation of young people in politics, because this is a fight that affects us all.
countries in Europe – in the France, as a report by The Good Lobby recalls, absent voters have the option to vote by proxy. They appoint a person who is responsible for representing them. The same measure is available in other states including, for example Belgium and Sweden. Then there is the option of an early seat, which provides for voting the day before the elections, or a special seat, which allows people in care facilities, hospitals and prisons to vote: the voter only has to go into a prepared structure. These opportunities are possible in many countries, from Denmark to Poland to Hungary. Another modality is theI vote, ie electronic voting (Estonia is an example) and postal voting, as in the case of Spain: it can be requested at any post office or electronically. Only Malta and Cyprus, like Italy, have no alternatives to physical voting. They never found them because they don’t need them due to their limited geographic scope. But different in Italy.