Expatriate voting

There’s a topic I never know or cared about before, but its something interesting. Sunday night I was downtown MVD and saw/heard what was obviously political advertising on a caravan of vans and trucks going down the main street – yet there was no scheduled election in Uruguay.

Turned it out it was for an election in Spain. Lots of locals can vote because they have Spanish passports and Spain allows expatriate voting. I later read an article about how the election skewed to the left as a result of the expats.

Its interesting that the residents of a country can be outvoted by people who in some cases have never been there! At first I didn’t understand Uruguay’s policy of not letting their expat residents vote, but after reading that now I do.