Spectacular rise in diaspora participation in recent Romanian presidential elections – i-voting logical next step!

Diaspora participation in the Romanian Presidential elections in November 2019 increased spectacularly compared to previous elections.

This was due to several new measures:

– increased number of election centres abroad (+ 200%)

– better and larger locations for voting

– extending opening time of polling stations from 1 to 3 days,

 – electronic registration using tablets & software applications (no more paper).

This made a huge difference.

In 2014 about 350.000 citizens from the Romanian diaspora voted after having had to que up and wait sometimes for more than seven hours.

In 2019 we reached almost 1.000.000 people voting within minutes.

It is important to mention that postal voting was available in both elections. However registration was extremely low in 2014

We estimate that although the above measures helped a lot, the costs were very high (3 days of elections, fees & salaries for election commissions, space & materials rental). This makes i-voting a logical next step to cut costs and make participation even higher.

About +4.000.000 Romanian citizens are living in other EU countries now.