Can foreign nationals vote ?

M

Merlin

Registered User
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Hi there,
I'm a foreign national (EC country) and have been living in Ireland since 1999. Until Friday I was under the impression that I would not be entitled to vote in Ireland because I do not have Irish citizenship(unless it was for the European Parliament).
On Friday I got a polling card and am now utterly confused. I never registered myself (a councillor send me some registration papers once but I never filled them in).
Can anyone shed light on this ?

Thanks
M.
 
While you may be entitled to register as a voter due to your residency, there may be a limit on the types of elections in which you can vote. The registration authority will need to know your citizenship because this will determine the elections at which you may vote.

The right to vote is as follows:

Irish citizens may vote at every election and referendum;
British citizens may vote at Dáil elections, European elections and local elections;
Other European Union (EU) citizens may vote at European and local elections
Non-EU citizens may vote at local elections only.
 
Very strange. You should be entitled to vote only in European and local elections. You haven't become an Irish citizen unknownst to your self by any chance? LOL. I can only surmise that someone has put you on the register and has stated that you are an irish citizen.
 
It makes you wonder about the integrity of the electoral register if this kind of thing can happen.

I don't know what type of form needs to be filled in, but I imagine whoever filled it in 'accidentally' forgot to indicate that the person was not an Irish citizen so they would be eligible to vote in every election.

There was something on the radio the other day where someone from the North was called to jury duty based on the fact that they had a holiday home down here. They never filled any forms, never registered anywhere, and they don't know how they got on the electoral register other than that someone filled the forms in their name. If this kind of thing can go on it makes you wonder how messed up the system is - what is to stop me (apart from non-technical observation at the booth) from registering 10 people at my address and using the polling cards to be truly democratic and give everyone my 1st preference ?

To the original poster, based on the previous post as a non-national you are not entitled to vote in this election. The fact that someone mis-entered some detail somewhere (while worrying) is co-incidental.

z
 
Thanks Vanilla & Welfarite,
Suppose I had better ring the election office and let them know so. Last time I checked I was still German..
 
I wonder would it be worth following up to see how you ended up with a polling card? It would be interesting to hear the outcome of that enquiry! Do you know any journalists who might like to write an article on it? Might be a fat fee in it for you which would temper the disappointment of not having a vote! BTW, is that councillor that sent you the papers running in the general election?!?
 
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Yes he is and now that I'm thinking about it this appears to be the only way I could have ended up on the register. I was in contact with him in relation to unsufficient bus services in north county Dublin (per email I might add). I remember vaguely that something came up about me being registered to vote

M.
 
OK, so can anyone tell us if it is possible to examine the register itself to see how a person ended up being registered and who registered them? Surely, a third party can't do that!? :eek:
 
I checked on the checktheregister.ie site and that tells me I'm not registered to vote - it gets weirder by the minute ?
 
Merlin said:
I checked on the checktheregister.ie site and that tells me I'm not registered to vote - it gets weirder by the minute ?
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check the register is not up to date. If you have a polling card you are registered.

Local councillors can have people put onto the register. If I recall correctly, there was a story at the time of the last election about a dog getting a polling card!
 
Merlin said:
Yes he is and now that I'm thinking about it this appears to be the only way I could have ended up on the register. I was in contact with him in relation to unsufficient bus services in north county Dublin (per email I might add). I remember vaguely that something came up about me being registered to vote

M.
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Which party does he represent? I think I can guess...
 
LOL. No wonder the sheep farmers are so well looked after! A flock of votes every time!

Seriously, councillors can have people put on registers? without questioning why they are not on registers already? Smacks of total cronyism if it is true.
 
I rang the election office of FCC. The nice lady there gave a big sigh and said that this was very unfortunate. When I asked her how I got on to the register in the first place she said that numerators (?) went around the estates and collected details for the register and that's how I would have gotten there. Hmmm sounds a bit weird to me and I also cannot remember any encounter that points in that direction.
She asked me to write on the polling card that I'm not an Irish citizen and post it to FCC...

M.
 
Changing the Voters Register!!!!! That's illegal. Someone called to my house, to verify who was living here. When I pointed out that he hadn't identified himself, that he had no authority to ask such questions he apologised and inferred that many people would not be au fait with regulations. He was a local cumain member. Hmmmmmm. I followed up my query with my local T.D., asking if it had been his initiative. He said it came from headquarters. I again protested.

Now I would like to know if in fact anybody did in fact add or deleter names from the register. I thought the days of and the opportunity to do so were gone!!!!

Seriously, councillors can have people put on registers? without questioning why they are not on registers already? Smacks of total cronyism if it is true
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Is this true?
 
justsally said:
Now I would like to know if in fact anybody did in fact add or deleter names from the register. I thought the days of and the opportunity to do so were gone!!!!
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Not at all. This is still happening regularly. My family are well known FF supporters down the country. My sister lives in a different constituency but prefers to vote at home to support the local FF'er. She is routinely dropped from the register and added again once it's spotted by the local cumann.
 
If you got one of the forms in the post (or from the numerators), you can fill in all details for everyone in the household, not just yourself. So in the case of, say, four students sharing a house, one could register all four. Can't remember if four individual signatures are required, but think not.
However you do have to tick a box as to Irish/British/Other-EU/non-EU citizen.
 
I moved house a few years ago and never registered myself but still got a polling card sent to my new address. Does it have anything to do with buying a house???
Can/does local council get a list from the developer???
 
I moved into a new house in August, and there was a registration form of some sort there when we moved in. We filled it out with myself and DH's details (me non-EU, him Irish) and sent it on it's merry way.

Recently, all the election mail we got was in my name, and I started to wonder. Then a candidate came by the door looking for me. He told us that I'm on the list, and DH isn't! I got my polling card last week, DH didn't. We presume someone messed up when transcribing the details we sent in.

Interesting to hear I'm not the only one in this boat.... what would happen if I actually tired to vote? As far as I can see, there's nothing to stop me since the card says I can use a credit card as id!!
 
Alias said:
what would happen if I actually tired to vote? As far as I can see, there's nothing to stop me since the card says I can use a credit card as id!!
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You would be committing a serious offence if you did this.
 
ClubMan said:
You would be committing a serious offence if you did this.
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I have no intentions of voting, since I haven't payed enough attention to the parties or the issues, and don't really know the way the political system here works (and didn't bother learning, since I can't vote). But I'm obviously not the only one in this boat. Can you provide any more insight than it's a 'serious offence'?
 
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