Since Polish parliament elections are coming in about 3 weeks I was wondering about under what conditions we will be voting in Ireland. Facing massive emigration from Poland, our - Polish - government should give the possibility to vote for every Polish citizen abroad, and of course it is possible. However, if you look closely, you will see how our far right government and Kaczynski brothers’ party are preventing people of voting abroad. The reason of doing that is very simply - majority of the emigrants are against our government, especially after some insulting words spoken by our president about emigration while his visit in Great Britain.
So let’s see how do voting conditions look in Ireland.
Polish law gives the right of free vote for every citizen of Poland over the age of 18. Every Polish citizen who is not able to vote in the place where he or she lives is entitled to vote in the other region of Poland or in Polish embassy or consulate abroad after being registered in the period from 25th of September till 16th of October. The way of doing that is quite simple and shouldn’t be any kind of limitation, since you can do it via phone, online or personally in the office. The problem begins visible when you compare the number of Poles in Ireland entitled to vote and the number of voting points. According to the website of Polish embassy in Dublin, there are going to be only 3 voting points in Ireland - in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. However, on the website there is no information about the addresses of voting points in Cork and Limerick, there is also no information about the opening hours of the voting points.
The situation is even worse for UK. On the website of Polish emabssy in London there is even no information about the elections and voting points in UK at all. Using the built-in search form with keyword “wybory” (elections), you get 0 results.
As for the Ireland, there is about 150 thousands of Polish emigrants roughly, but there are rumours that there is even more. I assume that there is at least 130 thousands of us entitled to vote. Dividing it by 3 we have 43 thousands voters for each voting point roughly. Can you imagine a queue of 43 thousands standing in a front of Polish embassy in Dublin, voting point in Cork and another one in Limerick? Assuming that each voting point will be open for 12 hours, there will be about 3600 voters every hour, that gives us about 60 voters for 1 minute. And that is over optimistic assumption. I presume that the voting points will be open for 10 hours only and that will give 4300 people for 1 hour and 72 people for 1 minute. Both options are impossible - the voting points won’t be efficient to service for such big number of people.
From the other hand, people won’t be willing to vote, due to the possibility of standing for hours in the queue without an end. Especially people from the other towns of Ireland. Will anybody want to come to Dublin from Carlow and spend 5 - 6 or more hours in the queue? I presume nobody.
Of course, it would be very hard and it would be quite expensive to set up a temporary consulate in every bigger Irish town and city (such as Gallway, Kilkenny, Carlow, Portlaoise, Tullamore, Drogheda and many more) it is quite clear. However our right side government seems to forget about the invention of the letter and post office. In some of the European countries you can vote via post, especially if you are abroad. It would be much more fair, when we would have a chance to vote via post, registering themselves in the embassy and getting special voting form to send back to embassy (to Dublin, London or whatever) using the local post.
In my opinion the conditions of voting prepared by Polish state are a clearly limitations of democracy.
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