Foreigners' right to vote

In most countries, suffrage, the right to vote, is generally limited to citizens of the country. Some countries, however, extend voting rights to resident non-citizens. Such voting rights extended to non-citizens are often restricted or limited in some ways, with the details of the restrictions or limitations varying from one country to another. Voting rights to non-citizens may or may not extend to a right to run for an elected or other public office.

In some cases, the United States being one such case, some subnational entities have granted voting rights to non-citizens. Conceptions of subnational citizenship have been reasons to grant this right to those normally excluded from it. Other countries have granted voting rights to non-citizens who hold citizenship of a country which is a fellow member of a supranational organization (e.g. members of the European Union). In a few cases, countries grant voting rights to citizens and non-citizens alike.

In a 2003 paper, David C. Earnest (then a graduate research assistant at George Washington University) surveyed practice of voting rights for resident aliens (or immigrants), concluding that although the practice is surprisingly widespread, the details varied considerably from country to country. In another paper, Earnest compared voting rights for resident aliens in 25 democracies, grouping them into six categories as follows:

After receiving his doctorate in 2004, Dr. Earnest published a further paper examining the political incorporation of aliens in three European democracies: Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

A number of separate supranational groupings of countries exist, and membership in some of these groupings may involve multinational agreements and treaties in which member countries agree to some degree of reciprocity regarding voting rights. Some individual countries are members of more than one supranational groupings, and some supranational groupings of countries are members of other supranational groupings of countries.

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty imposed reciprocity inside the European Union concerning voting rights in local elections; this already existed for the European elections. In several European states, the public debate on the right of foreigners to vote was therefore renewed, as some foreign residents had the right to vote (European foreign residents) while others, non-Europeans, did not. As a result of this debate, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Slovenia and Belgium extended the right to vote, in different manners, to all foreign residents (which was already the case in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Netherlands).

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