Diaspora law proposal
Whenever new laws are introduced or amended, we hold the requirements to a very high standard. All the work we do has to take into careful consideration one of the most important tasks at hand according to the Albanian population, the eventual accession to the EU of the Republic of Albania.
As such, we have amended law Nr. 10 019, datë 29.12.2008 to include the diaspora vote in a EU compliant way. This method guarantees that each and every Albanian citizens voting from outside the republic of Albania has a right to vote.
Read the full proposal here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_6T5fYrEbFd93vF5JZaEk-U2jRx4Q_QH/view?usp=sharing
Our proposed method guarantees that each and every Albanian citizens voting from outside the republic of Albania has a right to vote as well as:
Vote in a fair way
Vote in secrecy, without having to publish vote lists with private data. In compliance with EU GDPR law.
Have a transparent counting process, accessible to all public citizens
Minimize the time votes are “in-transit” open to possible manipulation
Usage of live streaming services to guarantee access to the vote reception and counting process.
Vote through a secure and simplified procedure, using digital means where necessary while using tried and proven methods for handling ballots.
The diaspora vote is an important topic to all of us, as it guarantees each Albanian citizen their right to vote wherever they are in the world. Democracy is a right that should know no borders.
Furthermore, this amendment to the law is not just an improvement made for the diaspora. We have taken into careful consideration as solid system utilized by many other European countries like the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. In this law, we have introduced Albania’s first unique vote pass system, guaranteeing vote secrecy while still being a strong verifiable system to guarantee no-one votes twice.
This new unique voting pass system can be used in future elections as well, as we support this new way of voting in further amendments to the law to make it fully compliant to EU law.
For now, we have also decided to include an additional district with its own list and thus its own representation in the Albanian parliament. This seems like the most fair and least administrative way to include the diaspora in a vote, keeping our democratic system simple. Keeping the law and thus the system simple and understandable is an important part of guaranteeing the least administrative overhead occurs, which in turn translates to a system easy to check for possible issues caused by malicious intent i.e. corruption.
In the future however we prefer a single list representation instead of the district system for the national elections where all Albanian citizens choose the people they want to be represented by in the coming 4 years. We have our community representatives elected through our council and mayoral elections and the national elections should be about who we deem most qualified to represent our nation as a single Albanian people.
As such we pledge to:
Further suggest improvements to electoral law, in compliance to EU law.
Further suggest improvements to electoral law, so each Albanian feels appropriately represented
Further suggest improvements to electoral law, to guarantee each citizens their privacy and secret vote, not just the diaspora
Further suggest improvements to electoral law, to make the system more reliable and easy to understand and check.