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who now what now?
Oct. 26th, 2012 01:20 pmThis is preposterous.
People living in the United States but born in and citizens of Venezuela were allowed to vote in the recent, contentious elections there. US citizens who live abroad are voting now in our (hopefully less danger-fraught but still contentious) elections next month. Those nice Venezuelan people, despite many of them having lived here for years, cannot vote in our presidential election (unless they have become dual nationals, which is not an easy thing to do, as the US disfavours that citizenship category).
But apparently, Scots-born persons who reside in the far-flung reaches of Carlisle or Berwick-on-Tweed will not be eligible to vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, while all sorts of folk form Bangor, Ballymena, and Basingstoke who have an address in Dundee, Dunbar, or Dunfermline can help decide the fate of a nation they might not be citizens of.
The article suggests that "it's difficult to imagine how an electoral register of everyone who considered themselves a Scot might be drawn up." Well, yes, but then nations rarely leave it to personal preference to decide who is or is not a citizen (a fact that lies at the heart of pretty much all immigration debates). The most commonly adopted metric is whether one is born within the geographical boundaries of the state (usually to include any foreign dominions, if a country has such). There's no question what the borders of Scotland are. Anyone who claims UK citizenship presumably has a birth certificate that shows where they were born. Some substantial number are naturalised citizens; those cases, indeed, would need some sort of mechanism to adjudicate. But it was pretty easy for the authors of the BBC piece to state that around 400,000 non-Scots will get to vote int eh referendum, while 800,000 Scots will not. That, to my mind, is completely ridiculous.
People living in the United States but born in and citizens of Venezuela were allowed to vote in the recent, contentious elections there. US citizens who live abroad are voting now in our (hopefully less danger-fraught but still contentious) elections next month. Those nice Venezuelan people, despite many of them having lived here for years, cannot vote in our presidential election (unless they have become dual nationals, which is not an easy thing to do, as the US disfavours that citizenship category).
But apparently, Scots-born persons who reside in the far-flung reaches of Carlisle or Berwick-on-Tweed will not be eligible to vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, while all sorts of folk form Bangor, Ballymena, and Basingstoke who have an address in Dundee, Dunbar, or Dunfermline can help decide the fate of a nation they might not be citizens of.
The article suggests that "it's difficult to imagine how an electoral register of everyone who considered themselves a Scot might be drawn up." Well, yes, but then nations rarely leave it to personal preference to decide who is or is not a citizen (a fact that lies at the heart of pretty much all immigration debates). The most commonly adopted metric is whether one is born within the geographical boundaries of the state (usually to include any foreign dominions, if a country has such). There's no question what the borders of Scotland are. Anyone who claims UK citizenship presumably has a birth certificate that shows where they were born. Some substantial number are naturalised citizens; those cases, indeed, would need some sort of mechanism to adjudicate. But it was pretty easy for the authors of the BBC piece to state that around 400,000 non-Scots will get to vote int eh referendum, while 800,000 Scots will not. That, to my mind, is completely ridiculous.
