Each election season brings with it a familiar frustration for Maltese citizens who have built lives abroad. Unless they can interrupt work, reorganise family life, reach an airport served by KM Malta Airlines, and secure a seat through the subsidised election fare system, they are effectively unable to exercise their democratic right.

For the 2026 general election, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that voters who will be abroad on polling day may vote early in Malta on Saturday 23rd May, ahead of polling day on Saturday 30th May. KM Malta Airlines has also announced €90 return fares and additional flights for eligible voters travelling back to Malta. Yet for those living outside the airline’s direct network, the offer remains limited.

For Ruth Baldacchino, a Dublin-based social justice expert and activist, LGBTQI rights advocate, and participatory philanthropy expert focused on gender justice, the issue is not willingness to vote, but access.

“Once again, I won’t be able to vote, not because I don’t want to, but because I cannot,” they said.

“I live in Dublin, a city KM Malta Airlines does not serve. To use the subsidised flight scheme, I would need to travel to London first: roughly 20 hours of transit because flights do not align, costs that quickly dwarf the €90 fare, and an entire working week disrupted. And that’s before we talk about people who don’t live in airport cities at all.”

They added: “This is what democracy looks like, Maltese edition.”

Malta remains among the few EU countries where citizens abroad cannot vote remotely in national elections. While other countries have introduced postal voting, proxy voting, embassy voting, consular voting, or electronic voting for at least some external voters, Malta continues to rely on physical return. 

A European Commission study defines remote voting as mechanisms that allow voters to cast their ballot by means other than attending their assigned polling station in person, including postal and electronic options. 

The contrast is particularly striking when set against Malta’s own digital ambitions. Malta Diġitali (A Digital Malta) 2022-2027 sets out a national vision for digital transformation, with a focus on building a better society and a thriving economy through technology. Government has also framed digitalisation as a way for Malta to overcome the limits of size and compete in the fourth industrial revolution.

Yet voting remains firmly analogue for those abroad.

Christa Boffa, a content specialist based in Florence, said the burden placed on overseas citizens is increasingly difficult to justify.

“Another general election in Malta and, as a Maltese citizen living abroad, I still cannot vote in my own country’s elections unless I fly back home,” she said.

“Yes, there are subsidised flights but they only cover a handful of routes, which naturally don’t include airports close to where I live, and even if they did, I’d still have to pay out of pocket.”

She added that the short notice of recent election cycles makes planning even harder.

“There’s little to no time to plan or find decent flight prices either. Not to mention the lost days of work and the mental load of organising it all just to exercise a basic democratic right,” she said.

“I genuinely cannot wrap my head around why this still hasn’t been sorted. Malta has changed enormously over the past decade, especially in terms of international presence. Yet, it keeps forgetting its overseas citizens every single election.”

The question, then, is no longer whether solutions exist. They do. The question is whether there is the political will to implement them.

Embassy voting, postal voting, proxy voting, and digital voting all present design challenges, from verification to security. But these are challenges other countries have chosen to confront. Malta, by contrast, has continued to treat subsidised flights as the main remedy, with prospective voters needing to provide their bank card details over the phone to secure the flights.

Malta is positioning itself as a digitally ambitious country, but the absence of any structured overseas voting mechanism is becoming harder to explain. A country that wants to be at the forefront of digital transformation is still asking its diaspora to board a plane to mark a ballot.

Could this be the last general election in which Maltese citizens abroad are told that participation in democracy begins with a flight booking?