'Double-voting' in EU elections? It's possible — but could cost you €15,000

“No, you may not cite my name, I know it is illegal. But I believe both the Dutch and the French EU politics concern me, and that I should be able to vote in both my countries, just as I can do in the presidential and legislative elections,” Aina told the EUobserver.

“Aina” is a 34-year-old Dutch and French citizen, residing in France. She said she would vote in both countries since her double citizenship is “a way to round a broken system”.

However, she doesn't want to “make the same mistake as that Italian journalist” and tell the EUobserver her real name.

She was referring to Giovanni di Lorenzo –  a dual-national Italian-German journalist who, in 2014, admitted to casting votes in both his countries. Subsequently, he received a huge fine from the German state.

“Actually, there are quite a few of us who will do this deliberately this year. We are discussing it in closed Facebook groups. Everyone knows it is illegal but we believe that it is and should be our right. I applied for French citizenship only to make sure to be able to vote in both countries” she said.

Aina showed EUobserver conversations one of these closed Facebook group for EU citizens in France, where members were exchanging what is legal and what is not and ways to game the system.

Some wanted to “hinder the extreme right” and others, in a climate thread, were discussing the best green candidates in different countries, in a multiple-voting context.

“We make sure we are not admitting to multiple voting directly, so we use a lot of ‘supposedly’ and ‘in theory' in our discussions,” Aina laughs.

It’s known as the European exception.

Since the Maastricht treaty was adopted in 1992, all EU citizens residing in a foreign EU country are allowed to elect their town councillors and MEPs in the country of residence.

As of today, approximately 13.7 million EU citizens live in a member state other than their birth country, according to the UN

There are several regulations in place to make sure EU citizens do not double-vote on 9 June. However, they are far from bulletproof.

To be eligible to vote as a non-citizen you need to register on an “additional list” in your municipality. By doing so, you renounce your right to vote in your birth country. 

Should you somehow manage to do that anyway, you risk prison and a €15,000 fine. 

The registration to vote had a deadline of 1 May, after which the municipality was obliged to communicate the list of additional voters to the state authorities and the state, in its turn, was obliged to inform the concerned member states.

In theory, this passing of data should make it impossible to double-vote. But the system is faulty, and the information is not always passed as should.

According to the EU Commission, ahead of the last elections to the European parliament in 2019, EU member states exchanged information regarding 1.3 million voters between February and May. That is only about 10 percent of the potential number of eligible voters abroad.

“This is supposed to be watertight, or that is what they want you to believe. But I have a friend who managed to vote in her home country’s embassy as well as in her municipality, as a non-citizen here in France. Absolutely nothing happened. The information had not been passed accordingly. That said, the best way to avoid problems is to do what I did, and obtain double citizenship,” Aina said.

The registration forms of the municipalities around Europe still differ, and are not always compatible with their counterparts — even though the EU Commission is coordinating conduct, and issues recommendations and tools. In addition, bi-nationals are not on registered on the additional lists  – so the municipalities have no obligation to pass on the data regarding them, even if they hold two passports.

The EU Commission is aware of these problems.

In 2019, it proposed a directive, adopted in parliament with some modifications in 2021, called  “Electoral rights of mobile Union citizens in European Parliament elections”. Its aim was to “protect the EU citizens electoral rights” but also to improve the prevention of multiple voting by synchronising registering calendars, and developing “a clearer legal framework”.

None of this was applied in time for this year's elections. 

There have been some registered cases of voting fraud in the European elections, such as in 2014 when Danish authorities failed to pass the data on registered voters to Swedish authorities in time, and it was later discovered that thousands had cast double votes.

“This wasn't considered a very important issue before. It was esteemed more important to protect EU citizens' electoral rights than to go after the very few who tried to round the laws. But when people organise around these practices, using voting fraud as a political tactic, it is of course a democratic problem — however small a phenomenon,” political scientist Laurence Smittet at the Sorbonne University told the EUobserver.