Circular from the Ministry of the Interior: the process for off-site voting gets underway

The process is now underway to make it possible for students, workers, or those requiring medical care or acting as carers to vote away from their registered constituency, with effect from the next elections. Following the approval of the electoral law, the Ministry of the Interior has sent a circular to prefects asking them to inform local councils of the obligations falling within their remit, “emphasising in particular the need for the register to be activated immediately and for the notice to be published” regarding applications.

The document contains instructions on how to draw up the annual municipal register of voters living away from their registered constituency, as required for general elections, European elections or referendums. According to the Circular issued by the Department for Internal and Territorial Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior, local authorities must publish on their websites, ‘well in advance of 31 December’, a notice setting out the requirements, deadlines, the application form and the contact details for submitting the application online for inclusion in the annual register of voters living away from their electoral district.

The Circular sets out the four categories of ‘non-local’ voters: voters who have been temporarily resident, for study or work purposes, for at least nine months in a municipality in a different region; those who find themselves in this situation for a period of at least three months, which includes the date of the election, either for reasons of their own medical treatment, or as family carers, or as parents or family members living with a child undergoing treatment or care in a healthcare facility outside the region.

The deadline for submitting applications is set each year at 31 December; municipalities must then, by 31 January of each year, notify the Central Directorate for Electoral Services of the number of voters registered on the electoral roll, broken down by the ‘away from home’ category and municipality of origin. Anyone who finds themselves in the ‘away from home’ category after 31 December must apply for inclusion within 30 days in order to vote in elections held during the year.

Municipal electoral offices must therefore maintain a register of voters voting away from their usual place of residence. The municipality of residence must respond ‘as promptly as possible’ to requests from the municipality of temporary residence, ‘noting on the polling station electoral roll on which the voter is registered that the voter will be casting their vote in another municipality’. Voters eligible to vote ‘away from their usual place of residence’ are allocated to ordinary polling stations according to their geographical proximity to their temporary place of residence and, as a rule, in numbers not exceeding 10 per cent of the voters registered in that polling station.