Voters Abroad
Atrios thanks Italian-born Canadians for helping to vote out Berlusconi. I’m happy about the election’s outcome, but I don’t know how I feel about this process.
The United States allows citizens to vote from anywhere with absentee ballots. Ireland specifically disallows it. In my wishy-washy way, I agree with both.
Irish-Americans can be pretty ignorant of politics back home, to the point of supporting terrorism. If an Irish political party - of any ideology - mounted a mass citizenship registration drive among these folks, they could in theory skew the entire Irish election system. There are a lot of us. (Based on the ignorance on display in this post, do you really think I’m qualified to make judgments on Irish politics?)
Foreigners eligible for US citizenship aren’t nearly as formidable a group relative to the US population, so there’s a limit to the electoral damage they can do. Their biggest effect is probably to turn the reddish states on the Canadian border (Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Maine) a little bluer. Plus (and I’m not being rational here) I’m an American, I might like to live abroad someday, and dammit I want my vote.
But returning to Italy, my concern is that the people cheering this latest result might not be so happy if the populations of South Philly, Bensonhurst, and Little Italy all became a force in Italian politics.