Friday, August 03,

Italians Abroad Voting Under Strong Scrutiny- How Much Reform ?

The ANNOTICO Report

 

It's difficult to predict whether there will be serious conceptual or merely technical, and administrative changes.

 

 

Voting Abroad Reform Being Studied

                                 

Tandem

Canada's Cosmopolitan Paper

Aug 5,2007-Aug 12,2007


The procedure for reforming the electoral law  "as regards how Italians living abroad vote" is already underway.
The announcement came last week from Deputy Foreign Minister Franco Danieli, in charge of Italians abroad, and did not detail which parts of the current law " known as Tremaglia Law after the former minister " are going to be reformed.

 

The fact that the committee studying the reform includes staff from the Prime Ministers office, the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Ministry, however, seems to imply that this will be no simple makeover, but rather a wide rewriting of the law, and as a consequence also of the application rules.

 

The launch of the reform procedure was probably hastened by the criticism addressed to the law, including the latest allegations of fraud, with a video allegedly showing multiple ballots being voted by one person in favour of the same candidate in Australia.


The video naturally elicited very different reactions from the opposing coalitions, with ruling parties questioning it and opposition parties using it as a reason for requesting yet another recount, or even the annulment of all ballots cast abroad.

On the other hand, the centre-left coalition had harshly criticized the Tremaglia Law even before its entry in force, asking for several changes.


There has also been a court ruling (by the State Counsel), in December 2002, expressing many reserves, some quite severe, on various aspects of said application rules.


In particular, the reserves concerned protection of personal data, options offered to voters deleted from the lists, communication from Consular offices to Italians living abroad, and some inconsistencies between the law and the rules on how ballots were to be delivered to the Consular offices.


Danielis announcement came two weeks after the joint declaration issued by ministers Chiti, DAlema and Amato, who, after the recent episodes highlighting weak points in the current law," advocated "a reform of the regulations on how Italians abroad can vote."


The committee was not given any guideline orienting the reform proposal. However, on the basis of the most frequent criticism, it is likely that there will be technical corrections, mostly concerning how ballots are delivered to voters and/or returned to the Consular offices.


The Tremaglia Law, in its general formulation, could not account for all the different mail systems operating in the various countries where Italians reside and may ask to cast their ballots; there is a formal requirement to put all voters in similar conditions, and deputy minister Danieli had repeatedly underscored this need.

 

Another issue that the committee might address concerns vote counting; in the first and only election where Italians voted abroad, counting operations were carried in one location in Castelnuovo di Porto (near Rome). Danieli called the location of unacceptable size, with "too many people working in one place" and "too much confusion."

 

 

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