Poles will now have access to traditional in-person voting as well as postal voting for the country’s upcoming presidential elections, and that is very good news for Poles, democracy, and the ruling government right-wing coalition.
The new voting bill, which passed in the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, was prepared by the Law the Justice (PiS) party with new amendments to the election law.
The move in the parliament was meant to remove legislation that mandated only postal voting for the presidential elections.
This means that voting by mail will be only one of the options that people can use to exercise their democratic right. Voters will be able to choose whether to go to the ballots or to stay home and vote via mail.
This is a return to 2015 when there was an option for postal voting for each citizen. Only 50,000 voters chose to use that option. In 2017, postal voting was restricted to only people with disabilities, which lowered the number to 3,000.
Given the coronavirus pandemic, it can be presumed that there will be more people who will vote from home. But there won’t be 28 million of them, which was the total number of people who could participate in postal voting.
The previous postal voting idea was doomed to fail.
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