To date a total of over 35,887 British expatriates have registered on-line as overseas voters with the largest concentrations in France, the USA, Germany, Spain and Australia (see The Connexion article below).
This compares with the traditional base of some 20,000 – 30,000 overseas voters regularly registered before the on-line option became available, a certain proportion of whom will not be included in the above total it can be assumed.
Therefore, the Electoral Commission remains at most only 50% towards meeting its ambitious target of 100,000 registered overseas voters by the time of the 7th May General Election, and more British expatriates need to register on-line to vote before 20th April, 2015 deadline.
The Connexion, France’s English-Language Newspaper, reports that:
“MORE expats in France have signed up to vote in the UK general election than expats in any other country since a new online registration system was opened last year. ”
“The Electoral Commission says 9,936 applications have been completed online by French residents, compared to 9,229 in the USA, 7,206 in Germany, 6,015 in Spain and 3,501 in Australia (the other countries with the largest numbers registered).
Why no statistics about those excluded from the right to register to vote – another example of the UK Establishment wasting time and money when the obvious issue is the democratic right of a citizen – I did apply to register under the Representation of the Peoples Acts which once decided that an overseas UK Citizen could register ( due to modern communication systems ) then spent some money – a very small amount on reducing the period of time allowed 20 years to 15 years tacking the issue on the end pages of a totally different UK Act Voting right = representation without = no democracy =