Expatriate Voting and Citizenship
2026/07/06 2 Comments
My analysis of expatriate votes in the 2025 election, broken down by province and country, and 13 ridings in which the percentage of expatriate votes is within one percent of the winning margin.
The impact of C-3 (citizenship by descent) is expected to be limited given Elections Canada requires expatriates to have resided in Canada in order to qualify for a special ballot, less likely in the case of second and earlier generations. But we shall see once we have full 2026 data on the overall numbers, ideally broken down by generation.
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
its really hard to vote out of country as an expat. You can’t request the ballot until the writ has dropped. When I last did it, everything had to be done by postal mail. I hope people can now apply online and have the ballot sent by email, only requiring one use of postal mail. And that’s assuming that candidates are nominated in your riding fairly quickly in the writ period.
You can, however, be on the permanent list, which reduces the time delays. We have two kids living outside Canada. Our daughter, living in the US, got her ballot in on time, our son, in Germany, did not. PROC didn’t really make any concrete suggestions along the lines you suggested, expect from an over abundance of caution and EC advice. Personally, think sending out ballots by email should be doable from a security perspective, and EC should be able to negotiate a preferred rate from UPS or Purolator for returning them (at the cost of the voter).