Giving expats the vote: what can the UK and Switzerland learn from each other?

The House of Commons in March 2023. How different will it look once the votes from long-term expats have been counted? Keystone / Andy Bailey

Until last month, British citizens couldn’t vote in British parliamentary elections if they had lived abroad for 15 years. The Conservative government hopes these “overseas electors” will turn out Tory, but the Swiss experience suggests it might have shot itself in the foot.

“Voting is a basic citizenship right regardless of where someone lives,” Jane Golding, co-chair of the campaign group British in Europe, said on January 16, when the 15-year rule was abolished. British citizens can now registerExternal link in the last constituency they were signed up in before leaving the country. They will also be able to donate to political parties and campaigns.

The change brings the UK in line with other major democracies which allow lifelong voting rights (at least at federal level), including the US, France, Italy, Canada and Switzerland. Official estimates reckon the number of people eligible to register around the world will increase from about 1.2 million to 3.2 million.

UK voting limits

Before 1985, British citizens resident outside the United Kingdom were unable to register to vote in UK Parliamentary elections. When the franchise was extended to British citizens resident overseas for the first time, a time limit of five years of having lived outside the UK was introduced. This was changed to a 20-year limit in 1990 and then lowered to the 15-year limit in 2002.

The British government committed to scrapping the 15-year limit and delivering ‘votes for life’ in its 2015, 2017 and 2019 manifestos.

This measure came into effect on January 16, 2024.

Source: British government impact assessmentExternal link

Did the Tories, as the Conservatives are also known, do this based on their belief in democracy? Maybe. They are, however, massively behind in the pollsExternal link and heading for a “massacreExternal link” in the next general election, which has to be held by January 28, 2025.

It is therefore understandable that the party, in power since 2010, is looking at all options to limit the damage. Last year voters in England had to present ID at polling stations for the first time – “a transparent effort to favour Tory voters: an older person’s bus pass suffices, a young person’s railcard does not,” said an unimpressed columnistExternal link in the Financial Times.

Age remains the key divide in voting intentions, with the Conservatives the most popular party only among the over-70sExternal link.

“What does it say about the Tories’ record in power that their target demographic is people who haven’t lived in the country at any point in the relevant period?” the FT said, referring to the votes-for-expats decision. “‘Have you tried catching a train in the last decade? No? Excellent!’”

Cynics might wonder whether the move is linked to the perception that many expats are wealthy, retired and likely to vote Tory.

However, this perception could also turn out to be quite an assumption. A study by the University of SussexExternal link immediately after the 2019 general election found “a definite trend from EU-based expatriates away from the Conservatives, who suffered a catastrophic drop in a share of the vote from a fifth in 2015 to a sixteenth in 2019”. The researchers concluded that the idea of expats as rich Tories sunning themselves in the Med was a stereotype from the 1980s.

The right-wing Daily Mail, warning that British expats “plan to punish Tories for Brexit”, quoted John CurticeExternal link, professor of politics at Strathclyde University. “Whatever benefit the Conservatives might have gained in the past from enfranchisement of overseas British citizens – and, in truth, no one can be sure how far that has been the case – there must be question marks about how much support the party can now hope to garner from expatriates living in the European Union, many of whom could well feel that their lives have been made more difficult by Brexit,” Curtice said.

Indeed, a study in 2022 found that British citizens living in the EU felt “ashamed” and “embarrassed” about being BritishExternal link since Brexit and Covid-19, with most responses being negative.

Double down or deviate

Switzerland has never had a Brexit moment, and the Swiss Abroad have lifelong voting rights, albeit not without challenges. What’s more, there is plenty of data on how they actually vote.

More than 800,000 Swiss citizens live outside Switzerland (about 11% of the Swiss population). Of those, about a quarter are registered to vote and, of those, about a quarter actually do so.

The general trend in parliamentary elections is for the Swiss Abroad to vote greener and more to the left than their compatriots in Switzerland. At the 2023 parliamentary elections, the main left-wing parties (Social Democrats and Greens) won almost 39% of the Swiss Abroad vote (compared with 27% for Switzerland as a whole), and the combined strength of the ecologist parties (Greens and Liberal Greens) was 30% abroad (17% in Switzerland).

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party remains the second political force among the Swiss Abroad but with scores that are significantly lower than those achieved at national level. “This is nothing new, which is why I’m not surprised that the People’s Party has not made greater inroads abroad,” said political scientist Martina Mousson.

When it comes to referendums and initiatives, on which the Swiss vote several times a year, Swiss voters abroad “double down or deviate – but they never tip the scales”, according to an analysis in September looking at how the Swiss Abroad voted over the past four years.

This showed that in 14 out of 36 votes, they voted yes or no much more emphatically than the domestic electorate. This was particularly the case on social and ethical issues. For example, a much higher proportion of Swiss Abroad voted yes to paternity leave (+18.2 percentage points), the revised Transplantation Act (+16.2), an increase in the pension age for women (+7.5), and “Marriage for all” (+7.1).

The Swiss Abroad also doubled down on the domestic no vote when they voted against the initiative to limit immigration: their rejection was a good 15 percentage points higher than the domestic result.

In addition, a quarter of all votes revealed a clear difference of opinion between domestic and expat voters. Unlike Switzerland as a whole, the Swiss Abroad approved the Clean Drinking Water initiative and the initiative to end factory farming. Their biggest deviation was on the CO2 Act, which failed at the ballot box in 2021. A whopping majority of the expatriate electorate, 72.2%, approved the legislation – almost 23 percentage points more than the overall yes vote.

If these trends are replicated in the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might come to regret widening the voter pool, although, as the study concluded, the Swiss Abroad never tip the scales – “their voice is simply too weak”. However, in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral systemExternal link, a handful of votes could in theory make a big difference.

Proxy music

About 42,000 British citizens live in Switzerland. The British embassy in Bern wasn’t able to say how many of them had lived in the country for more than 15 years, but it did say that around 3,000 are over 65.

The embassy said it had provided links on social media on what to do to vote, so will there be an online stampede to sign up?

As the Financial Times pointed out, fewer than a quarter of those eligible had registered for the previous election. “Interest will be even lower among those who left the UK longer ago,” it reckoned. “The country with most Britons abroad is Australia: good luck getting a postal ballot there and back in 25 days.”

Only about 4% of the Swiss Abroad settle in Australia, but they – and fellow Swiss in regions such as Asia, Africa and South America – are familiar with the stress and irritation involved in trying to make their voice heard. Indeed, a quarter of Swiss citizens who live abroad struggle to return their voting papers in time.

While British citizens abroad cannot vote online – something the Swiss are trialling – in one respect the Brits are arguably superior to the Swiss: they can vote by proxyExternal link. In addition to voting by post or in person, they can also get someone they trust to vote for them. In fact someone can be a proxy for up to four people (but only two of these can be based in the UK).

Proxy voting is not without its challenges – will the proxy actually vote how you told them to? – but is this something the Swiss could consider expanding? Currently proxy voting is authorised by some cantonsExternal link, but it is generally limited to people who have mobility issues.

We’ll keep watching these developments and British expats in Switzerland – Sunak has hinted he might call the election in autumn – but it seems unlikely that giving the vote back to citizens who live abroad will save the Conservative Party: it could even make its black eye even blacker.

“One day the Tories will realise that gerrymandering [manipulating voting boundaries] won’t get them out of their hole,” the Financial Times concluded. “It’s part of the reason they’re in a hole in the first place.”