Op-ed | Georgia Needs to Stop Treating Emigrants as ATMs that Give Cash and Ask no Questions

A few weeks ago, our organization, the Eastern European Centre for Multiparty Democracy, launched an advocacy campaign to enable Georgian citizens living abroad to vote (online) in the next Parliamentary elections. Georgia has a staggering emigration rate: out of its overall population of 3,7 million more than 125 thousand citizens left the country last year alone. In total, more than half a million have left in the last five years (Geostat). This is a significant number of voters for any election to influence its representativeness.

Levan Tsutskiridze is Executive Director of the Eastern European Centre for Multiparty Democracy/EECMD

The latest statistics put the Georgian population at 3,736,000. There are approximately 920,000 citizens under the age of seventeen.  This leaves us with around 2,800,000 voters in the country. According to CEC data (2021), there were 3,497,345 Georgian voters overall. Consequently, we are left with around to 700,000 voters who currently reside abroad. At the last 2020 parliamentary elections, around 15,000 eligible emigrant voters registered to vote. This is only 2% of the total number of expatriate voters. The number of voters who did not register and therefore did not have the opportunity to vote was a staggering 18% – a figure more than significant enough to force any government not afraid of a free vote to consider creating additional opportunities for these voters to participate effectively in elections.  

On paper, they are all eligible to vote. The Georgian constitution grants every citizen the right to vote. However, the barriers of time, space and money make voting abroad a theoretical possibility that becomes a fiction in practice: no Georgian voter can travel hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres from his place of residence to the foreign capitals where polling stations are in operation. Fearing the political consequences of a mass emigrant vote, no Georgian government to date has done anything to give these citizens a realistic chance to exercise their vital democratic right to vote. This is simply wrong and must be rectified.

Beyond the issue of basic human rights, there is an economic side to this: Georgia’s emigrant community is a lifeline for the Georgian economy. In 2022 alone, remittances amounted to almost €3 billion (IMF, 2022). As a share of GDP, remittances reach almost 16% of GDP (The World Bank, 2022) and are the second largest contributor to GDP just below the manufacturing sector (20%). Georgian emigrants contribute more to the Georgian economy than wholesale and retail trade (13.4%), construction (11.7%), transport and storage (7.1%), real estate (6.1%) or agriculture, forestry, and fishing (6%) (Geostat, 2023). More importantly, the well-being of many hundreds of thousands of Georgians depends on remittances: almost every second family living in Georgia has someone living and working abroad (to be more precise, every Georgian family of four would have 0.7 emigrants abroad).

Despite all of this, around 18-20% of total eligible voters are incapable of voting, while the state uses the benefits of their hard work as it sees fit. Sadly, every Georgian government has seen the emigrant vote as a threat to their position, preferring to treat them, as one emigrant friend once put it as “ATMs that give cash and ask no questions.”

This cannot continue if Georgia wants to be a genuine democracy, with a truly representative parliament. This is also in line with the spirit of the European Commission’s recent recommendations to Georgia that aim to ensure that the next elections are organized with “adequate representation” of the electorate. There can be no truly representative elections if the government de facto excludes 20% of voters from the electoral process.

There are several ways to address the issue: at EECMD, we are advocating online voting as a cost-effective and secure way of voting. Recently, in a positive exception, most of the opposition political parties have signed up to the draft bill that we initiated, which is now awaiting discussion in the Parliament So far, the government has fended off calls to introduce such a system by citing the threat of “hacking” or by labelling the calls to integrate the emigrants into the general voting process as “populism.” These are not serious arguments. Hacking can theoretically happen anywhere: the CEC’s servers could be attacked, as could those of the Georgian government and the Justice Ministry, which issue passports and national identity cards. Fortunately, none of them have shut down their online systems because of such risks.

There’s one big question on everyone’s mind when discussing the expatriate vote – Russia. Even if there were a theoretical solution to opening polling stations in Russia (in the absence of bilateral diplomatic relations), wouldn’t the authorities there put pressure on Georgian citizens and polling station workers, undermining the whole electoral process? Most probably yes. For these reasons, the Georgian citizens living in Russia, a hostile dictatorship representing the occupying power in Georgia’s 20%, can be excused from voting to protect and safeguard them from government attacks and persecution. Online voting, if introduced, would indeed offer some protection: allowing voters to change their vote several times before a certain deadline (say, in a 12-hour window while voting is open) would make it virtually impossible to exert any practical pressure on tens of thousands of citizens scattered in different cities over this long period.

Assuming for a moment that online voting is completely untenable, the onus is on the government to offer better alternatives. So far, the only response has been some half-hearted calls for the voters to travel to capitals and vote. Imagining a voter traveling from El Paso to Washington DC, from Toronto to Ottawa, or from Torino to Rome does not entirely negate the laws of gravity but does indeed defy any realistic expectation for someone actually performing such a feat, especially in large numbers. Such calls also sound very cynical from the authorities who, among other reasons, removed the Parliament from the regional city of Kutaisi and brought it back to Tbilisi, because it was “impractical and expensive.”

In practice, the alternatives for enabling participatory and representative voting abroad are many: combining online voting with paper (postal) voting in countries where there are organized and secure postal systems; allowing a wider window for voting by extending the voting period abroad by several days or weeks. Finally, the more orthodox approach is quite possible: simplifying the procedures for registering to vote abroad and opening polling stations wherever there are groups of Georgian citizens. This would not require major legislative reform and can be done simply by giving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Central Election Commission additional resources to organize safe and accessible polling stations outside the capitals.

The government branded these initiatives as “too dangerous” and therefore “populist”. Ironically, the traditional populist movement of the day has its roots in the struggle to represent and enfranchise voters, thus contributing to the democratization of the United States. As long as there are many Georgian citizens without the practical means to vote, we will continue to campaign for their access to the ballot box. If we trust Georgian expatriates to keep their families fed, their homes warm, and the country’s economy afloat, we have a moral and political obligation to give them a voice in Georgian politics.

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