Voting

Skepticism - whether sincere or spurious - of the postal vote can no longer be justified. The system works and has defied its detractors.

It worked simply and reliably, which is why it can also be expanded to cover parliamentary elections, hence also increasing the ability of citizens residing outside of Greece to exercise their right to vote. 

Youth leader Rareș Voicu remembers like it was yesterday when he went to the polls five years ago for the European Union elections in his Romanian hometown of Brăila.

The problem was that he was 16 years old at the time and not eligible to cast a ballot. Once his family went into the voting booths, he knew he could not.

With the June 9 European elections looming, Greek political parties are concerned about the high rate of abstention of young people aged 17-30, after an analysis of the qualitative data of the postal vote. 

Indicatively, in the two major urban centers of Attica and Thessaloniki, a total of 59,468 voters have registered, of whom only about 10,000 are young people, less than 17%.

The Greek government will submit by the end of the year a regulation that would expand postal voting rights  for the national elections, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday.

Deploying different strategies in the run-up to the June 9 European Parliament elections, political party staff are seeking to tap into the so-called "gray zone" of voters recorded by a recent poll conducted by the Pulse company.

The envelopes of the postal vote are traveling across the globe so that Greek citizens in 128 countries participate in the upcoming European elections. Destinations include a diverse mix of countries from Haiti and Saint Barthelemy in the Americas, Azerbaijan, Vietnam and Oman in Asia, Kenya and Congo in Africa to Papua New Guinea in Oceania.

In Wednesday’s vote, the motion of no confidence was rejected with 70 votes in favor and 58 against

The first part of postal voting for the June European elections was completed on Monday with the relevant platform receiving applications closing one minute before Monday midnight (Greek time). 

By late Monday, 190,382 citizens from 127 countries had registered on the platform for postal voting - which is being implemented for the first time in an election in Greece.

The deadline for registration on the postal voting platform expired at midnight on Monday, with the final number of registrants surpassing 200,000 from Greece and 127 other countries.

More than 157,000 Greek citizens have registered to vote by mail in the June 9 European elections, according to official figures released Saturday. Of these, about 116,000 are residents of Greece, while nearly 41,100 live in 115 other countries.