Naming no names, but someone has been challenging me today to…well, to do what you can see above in the title of this blogpost. Where on earth is this nonsense coming from all of a sudden? Brexit has given EU citizens an enormous incentive to vote Yes in any future independence referendum, and anecdotally that does seem to be exactly what the majority of them plan to do. This is absolutely the last moment to be retreating into ‘blood and soil’ nationalism and trying to strip ‘non-natives’ of their right to vote – it makes no strategic sense, even leaving aside the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the proposal.
I am, however, going to answer the challenge directly. Before I do, though, I’ll explain why the question would still be a monumental red herring even if it could not be answered. It wouldn’t actually matter if there was no country in the world that allowed foreign nationals to vote on constitutional matters, because excluding foreign nationals is not actually what is being proposed here, or at the very least it’s not the main thrust of the proposal. The suggestion is that some English people who hold both residency and citizenship in Scotland, in other words people who are not foreign nationals, should be stripped of their right to vote. You only have to think of it in those terms to realise what a total non-starter this proposal is – even if it was remotely desirable, which it is not.
But my answer to the challenge is very simple, and it’s the United Kingdom, which allowed non-British Commonwealth citizens to vote in the referendums on European membership if they were resident in the UK. That includes, for example, citizens of India, a country that contains eighteen per cent of the entire population of the world. As I was only asked to provide one country that allows foreign nationals to vote in constitutional referendums, I don’t need to go any further than that, but there will almost certainly be other examples if anyone wants to trawl through the electoral rules of other countries. One possibility is New Zealand, which allows all resident non-citizens to vote. If there’s any exception to that general rule for constitutional referendums, I haven’t been able to find any sign of it yet.
