How to Enfranchise Second Country Nationals? Test the Options for Best Fit… 35 best rule here because it aligns responsibility for political rights of nationals in the right way, that is, to the member states through which EU citizenship is acquired. Option (5) does less well though on the second dimension. As Alain Brun rightly observes, it is likely to be ‘tricky’ and ‘difficult’ to get all member states of the EU to coordinate their national legislation in this way (particularly if they have constitutional provisions against expatriate voting). Here Brun’s suggestion of adopting option (3) and the ECI proposal of option (1) both look more straightforward and exhibit greater continuity with existing EU practices. This matters because it is relevant to ask not just what fits best but how long it will take to remove the democratic wrong and harms at stake here. On the third dimension, option (1) has both strong positives and negatives. On the positive side, it provides political representation in an SCN’s immediate context of governance and it would also resolve the quite radical disparities between the implementation of the EU rule on local voting rights (consider the comparison of France and the UK, for example, where in France local voting rights are restricted to the level of the commune, while it the UK they include not only local and county council elections but also extend to voting in devolved assembly elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) since it would remove any constraints that pertain to the linkage of local and national representation (as occur, for example, in France where members of the Senate are chosen through an electoral college comprised on locally-elected officials). On the negative side, option (1) completely severs the political relationship between citizen and their state of nationality and also breaks the widely held link between citizenship of the state and voting rights (although this link does not hold universally even between EU member states, as the mutual granting of voting rights between the Republic of Ireland and the UK illustrates). Option (3) is, arguably, worst here since it provides the choice of either political representation in the immediate context of national rule or maintaining a political link with one’s state of nationality without resolving disparities in relation to local voting and while breaking the citizenship-franchise link at national level. Option (5) delivers neither the strong positives nor the negatives of option (1). It maintains the linkage between national citizenship and suffrage at national level, and is likely to support a general easing of access to nationality of the state of residence for third country nationals in the same way that EU rules on local voting have supported their extension to third country nationals in a number of states.