A study by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation that analyzed the difference between registered voters and resident citizens concluded that emigration is the country’s leading cause of technical abstention and that, at a regional level, the most significant deviations are in the Azores and Madeira.
The “policy paper” looked at the years 2001, 2011, and 2021, which revealed a negative evolution of the phenomenon in the Azores. While the discrepancy between the number of voters and resident adults in the region was 6% in 2001, the percentage rose to 15% in 2011 and 17% in 2021.
In Madeira, the estimated percentages for the years in which censuses were carried out by the National Statistics Institute are 4% in 2001, 19% in 2011, and 20% in 2021.
The researchers analyzed the results of the last national parliamentary elections, in which abstention in the country was 42%, and found that this “would drop by seven percentage points if the Portuguese who live abroad but maintain their address in the country – and are therefore registered to vote in Portugal – were included on the electoral roll of constituencies abroad”.
The most significant gap between voters and resident citizens is at the district level in the north. Vila Real is the most “acute case, with a 25% deviation in 2021.
However, the constituencies that contribute most to the difference are on the coast. As the paper points out, “around 48% of the excess voters are concentrated in the districts of Lisbon, Porto, Braga and Setúbal”.
The impact on the distribution of seats may be considered “slight,” but it is a reality. The researchers point out that, in the case of the national legislative elections, “if the number of deputies in each of Portugal’s constituencies was determined by the estimate of resident Portuguese adults instead of the number of registered voters, Madeira, Vila Real, and Viana do Castelo would each lose one deputy compared to 2022”.

The situation in the Azores is not measured, but Porto would elect two more parliamentarians to the Assembly of the Republic and Setúbal one more. “This would further reinforce the geographical asymmetry of political representation that already exists today, with the more peripheral constituencies losing political weight in favor of the constituencies in large urban areas,” it is pointed out.
The study suggests several measures, including “making voter registration abroad more flexible and appealing to Portuguese living abroad”, which could be achieved “for example, by increasing the number of deputies who are elected by the two constituencies abroad (Europe and outside Europe)”.
One of the suggestions is based in the Azores. The paper stresses that if the priority is to increase citizen participation in elections, “over-registration will always be preferable to under-registration.” Any change that further widens the inequality between voters in different parts of the country must be accompanied by measures that take advantage of the currently wasted votes. “Possibly through the creation of a national compensation circle similar to the one that already exists in the elections for the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores,” it said.
In January, when preparations were underway for the early regional elections, the spokesman for the National Electoral Commission, Fernando Anastácio, explained the phenomenon to DI (Diário Insular newspaper) and stressed that there was no longer any impact from the so-called ghost voters. “There are a lot of people who have registered in one place, have their citizen’s card registered there, but then aren’t actually living there; they’ve emigrated, or gone to Lisbon, or somewhere else,” he said.
“They keep their formal residence registration in the autonomous region, but they’re not actually living in the region and that’s why they’re not read in the Census,” he added.

in Diário Insular – José Lourenço, director

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Cultures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance)  at California State University, Fresno–PBBI thanks the sponsorship of the Luso-American Development Foundation from Lisbon, Portugal (FLAD)