On behalf of Jeunesse Valdôtaine, Jeunes Unser Land, Giovani per l’Autonomia and Femu
Ghjuventù
Jeunesse Valdôtaine, conjointly with Jeunes Unser Land, Giovani per l’Autonomia and Femu Ghjuventù
WHEREAS Article 48 of the Italian Constitution provides that "voting is personal and equal, free and secret. Its exercise is a civic duty," establishing the right to vote as the foundation of democratic participation;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), which guarantee every citizen the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs and to vote in genuine periodic elections by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to free elections and which, according to the settled case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (in particular Mathieu-Mohin and Clerfayt v Belgium, 1987; Hirst v United Kingdom (No. 2), 2005; Sitaropoulos and Giakoumopoulos v Greece, 2012; Shindler v United Kingdom, 2013), requires States to ensure the effective exercise of the right to vote, including by considering appropriate arrangements for voters far from their polling station;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 10(3) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), under which "every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union," a founding principle running through the whole of European electoral law;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which establishes Union citizenship and recognises, in paragraph 2(b), the right of
Union citizens to vote and stand as candidates in European Parliament elections and in municipal elections in the Member State of residence;
HAVING REGARD TO Article 22 TFEU, which guarantees Union citizens the right to vote and stand as candidates in municipal (paragraph 1) and European Parliament (paragraph 2) elections in their Member State of residence under the same conditions as nationals of that State;
HAVING REGARD TO the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in particular Article 39 (right of every Union citizen to vote and stand as a candidate in elections to the European Parliament) and Article 40 (right to vote in municipal elections);
HAVING REGARD TO Council Directive 93/109/EC of 6 December 1993 laying down detailed arrangements for the exercise of the right to vote and stand as a candidate in European Parliament elections for Union citizens residing in a Member State of which they are not nationals, which however does not address the situation of citizens residing in an electoral constituency different from that of their legal domicile within the same Member State;
HAVING REGARD TO the Act concerning the election of the members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage, annexed to Council Decision 76/787/ECSC, EEC, Euratom, as amended by Council Decision 2002/772/EC, Euratom and by Council Decision (EU, Euratom) 2018/994 of 13 July 2018, which leaves Member States a wide margin of appreciation in regulating the practical arrangements for voting and explicitly allows the introduction of postal voting, advance voting and, under certain conditions, electronic and internet voting;
HAVING REGARD TO the European Commission proposal of 25 November 2021 amending Directive 93/109/EC in order to facilitate the exercise of European electoral rights by mobile citizens, which underlines the need to modernise voting modalities (postal, advance and electronic voting) for the approximately 11 million European citizens living in a Member State other than their own;
HAVING REGARD TO the European Parliament legislative resolution of 3 May 2022 on the proposal for a Council Regulation on the election of the members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage, repealing Council Decision 76/787/ECSC, EEC, Euratom and the Act annexed thereto (procedure 2020/2220(INL)), which calls on Member States to broaden voting modalities, including postal and electronic voting, in order to facilitate participation by citizens residing outside their constituency of registration;
HAVING REGARD TO the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) — CDL-AD(2002)023rev2-cor — which enshrines universal suffrage as a fundamental principle and calls on States to adopt
concrete measures to guarantee the effective exercise of the right to vote for all citizens, regardless of where they are at the time of the election;
HAVING REGARD TO the Venice Commission Report on Out-of-Country Voting (CDL-AD(2011)022), adopted at its 87th plenary session (Venice, 17–18 June 2011), which calls on Member States to take a positive approach to the right to vote of citizens living outside their country of origin and to put in place practical arrangements (postal, consular or electronic voting) to that end;
HAVING REGARD TO Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to Member States on standards for e-voting, adopted on 14 June 2017, which to date constitutes the leading international standard on electronic voting and sets out the requirements of security, verifiability, transparency and protection of the secrecy of the ballot applicable to the introduction of such systems;
HAVING REGARD TO Resolution 1459 (2005) and Recommendation 1714 (2005) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the abolition of restrictions on the right to vote, adopted on 24 June 2005, which call on Member States to enable their citizens living abroad to vote in national elections, by postal, consular or electronic means, and to cooperate with one another to that end;
HAVING REGARD TO Italian Law No. 459 of 27 December 2001 ("Norme per l'esercizio del diritto di voto dei cittadini italiani residenti all'estero"), which introduced postal voting for citizens registered in the AIRE (Registry of Italians Resident Abroad), recognising the need to guarantee the right to vote of those who reside far from their polling station, but without extending this option to citizens domiciled in a different constituency within the national territory;
HAVING REGARD TO D.P.R. No. 104 of 2 April 2003, the implementing regulation of Law No. 459/2001, which sets out the operational arrangements for postal voting from abroad and demonstrates the technical and organisational feasibility of decentralised voting systems, applicable by analogy to off-site voting within the national territory;
HAVING REGARD TO the French Code électoral, in particular Articles L71 to L78, which regulate proxy voting; following the entry into force, on 1 January 2022, of the "deterritorialisation of proxy voting" (Law No. 2019-1461 of 27 December 2019 and Decree No. 2021-1453 of 8 November 2021), the proxy holder may now be registered in a commune different from that of the principal, an example of particularly advanced European good practice in safeguarding the democratic participation of mobile voters;
HAVING REGARD TO the German Federal Electoral Law (Bundeswahlgesetz — BWahlG), in particular §§ 17 and 36, which since 2008 allow any voter to obtain a polling certificate (Wahlschein) enabling them to vote by post (Briefwahl) without having to provide a reason
— a mechanism contributing to among the highest turnout rates in Europe and constituting a benchmark for accessible voting;
RECALLING Estonian legislation which, since the municipal elections of October 2005 and the parliamentary elections of 2007, has introduced internet voting (i-voting), fully operational and secure, allowing every citizen to exercise the right to vote from anywhere in the world, and which in the 2023 parliamentary elections reached more than 50% of votes cast electronically;
WHEREAS digital transformation and secure electronic identification technologies — such as those established by Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 (eIDAS), as revised by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 establishing the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) — make it technically feasible today to introduce electronic voting that meets adequate standards of security, verifiability and secrecy, as demonstrated by the Estonian experience and ongoing pilot projects in several Member States;
RECALLING the EU Erasmus+ 2021–2027 programme (Regulation (EU) 2021/817 of 20 May 2021), which finances cross-border student mobility, involving each year millions of young Europeans who often find it materially impossible to exercise their right to vote in their constituency of registration for logistical and economic reasons;
BELIEVING that the full participation of young people in democratic life is a strategic objective of the European Union, enshrined in the EU Youth Strategy 2019–2027 (Council Resolution 2018/C 456/01 of 26 November 2018) and reaffirmed in successive European Council conclusions, and that this objective will remain a dead letter as long as material obstacles to the exercise of the vote persist;
RECALLING the Report on the Final Outcome of the Conference on the Future of Europe (9 May 2022), whose proposals on European democracy (in particular Proposals No. 38 and 39) call for the harmonisation of voting conditions for European Parliament elections and the facilitation of electoral participation by all European citizens, especially those in mobility;
WHEREAS in Italy, as in many other EU Member States, the right to vote is still tied to the constituency of registration in the civil registry, forcing hundreds of thousands of university students, workers away from home, and citizens temporarily domiciled elsewhere to bear considerable transport costs — sometimes amounting to several hundred euros for train, plane or bus journeys — for the sole purpose of exercising a constitutionally guaranteed right;
WHEREAS this structural barrier constitutes de facto discrimination against young people, less affluent classes and anyone in a situation of mobility, reducing democratic participation in proportion to the geographical distance between legal residence and effective domicile;
BELIEVING that the absence of European-level harmonisation of off-site voting modalities generates a fragmentation of the European democratic landscape, with exemplary Member States already guaranteeing postal, proxy or electronic voting and others still providing no alternative to physical voting at the constituency of registration;
In light of all the foregoing, EFAy commits to:
1. Promoting, at European, national and regional levels, the adoption of a legal instrument of the European Parliament and the Council — directive or regulation, depending on the appropriate legal basis — harmonising the modalities for exercising off-site voting rights in all Member States, providing as a mandatory minimum standard at least one of the following options: proxy voting, postal voting, secure electronic voting in compliance with Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5, or voting in the commune of effective domicile in lieu of that of registration in the civil registry;
2. Supporting, in all Member States that do not yet have such legislation, the swift adoption of an off-site voting law guaranteeing all citizens registered in a commune different from their domicile — in particular university students, workers in mobility and persons travelling for medical reasons — the right to cast their vote in the commune of their effective residence, for all electoral consultations (legislative, European, regional, municipal and referendum), without additional cost to the voter;
3. Calling on the European Union to allocate dedicated resources, within the Next Generation EU, Erasmus+ and Digital Europe programmes, to support Member States in establishing the technical and administrative infrastructure necessary for the introduction of secure electronic voting, in full compliance with the standards of Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 of the Council of Europe, with particular attention to cybersecurity, verifiability of the vote and protection of the secrecy of the ballot;
4. Promoting the updating, by the Venice Commission and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, of the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters and of the Report on Out-of-Country Voting (CDL-AD(2011)022), so that they explicitly recognise off-site voting as a requirement of effective universal suffrage and include accessibility of voting for citizens domiciled outside their constituency among the criteria for evaluating national electoral systems;
5. Developing, in coordination with European institutions, youth organisations and universities, an information and awareness campaign on the right to off-site voting, so that every young person in mobility — in particular Erasmus+ beneficiaries — knows the modalities available in their Member State and is aware of their democratic rights;
REAFFIRMING that democracy cannot be a privilege reserved to those who can afford a train ticket: the Europe we want to build is one where every voice counts, wherever its bearer may be.