Let expats vote in the countries where they live

PAYING €7.50 to vote is annoying, but it beats a 10-hour round trip on a bus. Aleksandra Sojka, a Polish academic who works in Spain, had to post her ballot in the first round of the Polish presidential election on June 28th. This is an improvement on 2007, before postal voting was introduced, when Ms Sojka made the 500-mile round trip from Granada to the Polish embassy in Madrid to cast a vote. Voting on matters closer to home is not an option. In Spanish national elections, as in much of the EU, non-citizens who live in the country have no vote. Ms Sojka has no say on the government under which she has lived, worked and paid taxes for over a decade. Yet with her Polish ballot she will help decide on the president of Poland—a place she left for good in 2007.

A quirk lurks at the heart of the EU’s cherished freedom-of-movement rules. Poles who move to Spain can find work, send their children to a local school, claim benefits if they fall on hard times, or enjoy health care if they fall on a hard floor, just like any Spaniard. But they cannot vote in the elections that determine these services, even though they pay for them through their taxes. Free movement is fundamental for the EU, but it comes at a civic cost. Taxation without representation was famously a bugbear of American colonists in the 18th century. It is a fact of life for...