After Romania cancelled its Presidential elections in December 2024, following allegations of Russian interference, the importance of transparency and openness in the European election process became even more irrefutable. Vot Diaspora, a digital platform and an ultimate guide for Romanian citizens abroad to vote in the elections, is one of the instruments created to empower the citizens and contribute to the transparency of the election procedure.
Facilitating voting process
Run by the non-profit organisation Code for Romania in 2016 and supported by the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it gathers all the necessary information for the voters to participate in the election process. Depending on whether the citizens have a domicile abroad, they can find the step-by-step procedure and obligatory documents. At the same time, Vot Diaspora also locates the assigned polling station according to the voters’ status.
Pioneering and in-demand
As the first digital project of Code for Romania, it is popular and actively used by Romanian voters on the European and national levels. In 2019 during the European Parliament elections, 25% of all the diaspora accessed it, while in the 2024 Presidential elections, 185,000 citizens tapped into the application for information. With the new rounds of the elections scheduled for May 2025, Code for Romania expects to update the map as soon as the current polling stations are made available.
Open Source
The platform’s code is open and publicly accessible on GitHub and licensed under the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL 2.0).
Larger electoral ecosystem
Vot Diaspora is one of the four digital solutions developed by Code for Romania to improve the transparency of the country’s electoral ecosystem. Vote Monitor is a monitoring app for registered observers from NGOs to report and access in real-time the situation in polling stations. Following the success of the platform in Romania and several other European countries, a complementary tool was launched for the citizens to report voting irregularities – Atent la Vot (eng. Attentive to Voting). Collected input is then analysed by a team of independent journalists and processed for further investigation. The last tool, Rezultate Vot (eng. Voting Results), aggregates data about all electoral results in Romania in the form of an interactive map. Together, these four open-source platforms create a robust electoral ecosystem to ensure free and fair elections.