How to Enfranchise Second Country Nationals? Test the Options for Best Fit, Easiest Adoption and Lowest Costs David Owen The proposal of this ECI by Philippe Cayla and Catriona Seth is a welcome initiative addressing a problem that has already been highlighted by the European Commission1, namely, that some ‘second country nationals’ (SCNs) lose their entitlement to vote in the national elections of their state of nationality without having acquired the right to vote at this level in their state of residence. This is a democratic wrong since it is not democratically legitimate that a person lawfully exercising a civil right shall in virtue of such exercise be deprived of a political right. The democratic harm that results is, given the political constitution of the EU, not simply that the disenfranchised individual has no say in who represents them in the national legislature or executive but also, consequently, that they have no say in relation to who represents them at the Council of Ministers. While I share Andrew Duff’s view that ‘the rights prescribed in Articles 39 and 40 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights concerning voting and standing in local and European elections’ are not ‘as comprehensive as the citizen rightly demands’, I see little reason to think that this situation will change with the EU’s signing up to the ECHR, not least since ‘the people’ is one of the more complex and contested terms in the legal and political lexicon. How, then, is this demos problem best addressed? Four simple general rules are available as options for resolving the legitimacy deficit that characterises the status quo: 1. All SCNs have national voting rights in the state of residence. 2. All SCNs have national voting rights in the state of nationality. 3. All SCNs have the choice between (1) and (2). 4. All SCNs have a time-differentiated combination of (1) and (2) which starts with (2) and, after a period of residence, switches to (1). It is notable that (2)–(4) can be, more or less, combined in a more complex rule: 1 European Commission (2010), EU Citizenship Report 2010: Dismantling the obstacles to EU citizen’s rights, COM(2010) 603 final. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_6 33