Virtual Citizens Cannot Wait Until March

In three weeks, the Federal Electoral Commission must publish the final voter roll for the March 2027 general election. That roll will determine who votes on 11 March. Yet the Suffrage Question — whether virtual citizens cast federal ballots at all — remains unresolved. The Carcamo case sits before the Federal Court with oral arguments scheduled for September, four months after the voter roll closes. This timeline is not a procedural inconvenience. It is a constitutional problem.

The three pathways to resolution — court referral, enabling statute, or amendment — each depend on clarity before 15 January 2027. The Federal Court cannot deliver that clarity if it hears argument in September and must rule before the March vote. A judgment handed down in late autumn, or winter, leaves the Electoral Commission weeks to rewrite the roll and notify hundreds of thousands of newly eligible or newly ineligible voters. The alternative is worse: the Court ruling after the election, or the Commission proceeding under legal uncertainty, or both.

The governing coalition holds the power to act now. Prime Minister Doric's Partio de Unueco commands 34 seats; La Verda Aliro's 18 would give a simple majority of 52 for an enabling statute. The PdU caucus is divided on the merits, but that division is precisely why the question should not be left to the courts. The Assembly's role is to deliberate and decide. The Court's role is to police the Constitution's boundaries, not to guess at the Assembly's intent when the Assembly has not yet spoken.

A constitutional amendment would require 67 seats and is unlikely to clear by January. But an enabling statute — a simple majority vote extending the franchise to virtual citizens on a reasonable residency basis — would settle the question, allow the Electoral Commission to prepare, and let March's vote proceed on stable ground. The Assembly should debate this in the autumn sitting, vote before the year's end, and leave the Court to its proper work: reviewing the result, not making the decision.

The Suffrage Question is real and deserves the Assembly's best argument. But that argument must happen now, in the chamber, where it belongs. The Federal Court's docket should not become the clock that governs the Republic's franchise.