Should long-term expats vote?

[dreamville_bg]

I know, it's a constitutional right: if you still have citizenship of your country of origin, most constitutions say it shouldn't matter if you've lived abroad for decades. You have the right to vote.

For example, federal law gives US expats who no longer are residents of any state the right to vote in presidential, senate and house elections in

Comments

[abomvubuso]

I had a recent discussion about this with a compatriot living in the UK for more than 10 years. She said there are people living abroad who still care deeply about their country, probably even more than many people living here. They frequently vote on our elections, they're even involved in social events with expats, they're intelligent people who've sought for self-realization abroad, who are capable of critical thinking and are able to see our politics through a different, broader, more cosmopolitan perspective. They have relatives and property back home, they still pay taxes on that property, and they regularly send money back to their relatives here, thus contributing to the economy.

If we're to exclude all expats from voting for the sake of blocking some poisonous phenomena like the one you mentioned in Turkey, then we'd have to scrap all those citizens who are probably more useful to their country than many still living in the country itself.

Oh, and for the record, I'm one of those.

[ddstory]

Word.

[dreamville_bg]

Good points. But we've got to come up with something, and fast. Erdogan almost got a Trojan horse in our parliament. Next time he'll succeed.

[htpcl]

In order to make those changes into law, we'd need to change the Constitution. And we'd need a special Great Parliament for that purpose. The problem is, we can't commit time and resources to a Great Parliament even for the most important constitutional reform that we need more urgently - what's left for minor issues* like this expat voting question

[luvdovz]

Ethnic parties are a pest on democracy, I've always maintained. Parties should be about ideology, about policy, about different approaches to governing. Ethnic parties pretend to be representing certain ethnic groups, but what they really are, is the shortest path to separatism.

As for your expat voting question, being an expat myself, I would disagree. I live in Sweden but I'm still actively involved with Icelandic politics. You'd have to do some pretty lame legislating magic to discriminate against certain groups that you dislike without violating all possible principles of democracy and human decency.

[dreamville_bg]

Ethnic parties are an elegant form of serfdom. There are entire regions where these parties act as if they're some sort of feudals, a quasi-state within the official state.

They've been kept all this time because of the notion that they maintain the ethnic peace by holding certain minorities under control. This has given them a free pass to do as they please within their domains - which has undermined people's trust in statehood in this country, and has emboldened those minorities to a point where they're now blatantly discriminating everybody else within their regions.

This will have to stop one way or another. I hope not the Yugoslav way.

[luzribeiro]

Why don't you just eliminate dual citizenship and be done with all this crap?

[dreamville_bg]

Yes please!

[policraticus]

Your situation seems pretty shitty. Doing away with dual citizenship seems like a necessary step.

As an American, you carry your citizenship with you wherever you go, for as long as you go. This is a common tradition, reaching right back to the old "Civis Romanus sum." Any diminution of those rights are going to be based on arbitrary standards extrinsic to the person themselves. So, it is conceivable that a person living as an ex-patriot could be just as, if not more than, engaged in the politics of the US than a person who is residing inside the US. Considering how many US citizens fail to vote when it rains, accepting a vote mailed from 8,000 miles away under onerous conditions seems like a fair thing. And if they are not engaged, so what? If we disenfranchise people based on their ignorance of policy then we'd have to disenfranchise a lot of people, some of who are members of Congress.

[dreamville_bg]

I'm all for it!