Portuguese can vote in any polling station in upcoming EU elections

Portuguese voters will now be able to vote at any polling station in the country, and at posts abroad, in the 2024 European elections, Portugal’s Internal Administration Minister José Luís Carneiro announced in Porto on Tuesday.

Carneiro spoke to journalists after the opening session of MAI Tech, a technology conference on security and civil protection organised by his ministry at the Rectory of Porto University.

“Citizens, regardless of where they are on voting day, can exercise their electoral right anywhere in Portugal or abroad, where they will have to go to a consular post or a diplomatic post,” José Luís Carneiro told journalists Tuesday.

Polling stations “will now have the electoral registers in a digital version, on a computer”, said the minister giving the example of someone registered in Porto who could go to “any polling station in the Algarve” if, on election day he were on holidays in the Algarve.

At stake is the consolidation and generalisation of the “practice of early voting, as already occurred during the pandemic” and also the dematerialisation and digitalisation of electoral registers, now allowing mobile voting, said Carneiro.

“As the electoral registers are now dematerialised, whoever is at the polling station, with their citizen’s card, goes to the respective computer, sees the number of the respective voter and downloads the vote from that voter”, the minister explained.

As for mobile voting abroad, this will also be possible “in the light of the draft law” that will be presented, and the scrutiny of votes will be carried out “at consular posts”.

If a voter is “in France or Germany, they have to know where the polling stations are” and go there with their citizen’s card and vote.

“A verification of the citizen is made on the basis of their citizen card and is also downloaded into the electronic registers”, the minister also said.

The European elections are scheduled for June 2024.

(Jorge Eusébio | Lusa.pt)