After all, how many people abstain from voting in Portugal?

FFMS paints an unprecedented picture of abstention in Portugal and concludes that it has been inflated. There is a deviation of almost one million voters between the population estimates and the voters registered on the country's electoral roll. The main reason for this is the Portuguese who are living abroad but are registered to vote here. In turn, so-called ghost voters have little weight in the official register of those who abstain.

30 November 2023

3 min

Team

João Bernardo Narciso

Author

In the last legislative election in 2022, abstention reached 42 per cent among Portuguese residents.

The researchers analysed the electoral results and concluded that this abstention would fall by seven percentage points if Portuguese people living abroad – but who maintain their address in the country and are therefore registered to vote in Portugal – were included on the electoral roll of constituencies abroad.

The authors argue that emigration is the main cause of technical abstention in the country. In other words, it is responsible for that part of the official abstention rate that is not the result of choosing not to vote but rather of the existence of a higher number of registered voters than actual voters.

This policy paper also dispels the myth of ghost voters. Up to now, keeping the names of people who have since died on the electoral roll was cited as the main cause of over-registration.

On the eve of parliamentary and European elections, the authors point to several measures to resolve this phenomenon. Here we highlight two of them:

Making voter registration abroad more flexible and appealing to Portuguese living abroad. For example, by increasing the number of MPs who are elected by the two constituencies abroad (Europe and outside Europe). Or, alternatively, merging the two constituencies.
Making it easier for Portuguese emigrants to vote remotely, by extending early and mobile voting to the network of embassies and consulates abroad in all elections. Another option would be to give citizens who have their civil address in Portugal the chance to vote in constituencies abroad.

Through this policy paper, Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos wants to learn more about abstention in the country and its causes, thus making it possible to increase the effectiveness of measures to combat it.