A More Comprehensive Reform Is Needed to Ensure That Mobile Citizens Can Vote Sue Collard This initiative is a timely exercise with the upcoming prospect of the European Year of Citizens in 2013, and it has stimulated an interesting and useful debate in which the various contributions have covered most of the key issues at stake in the proposal. There are however a few questions that I would like to raise to add to the discussion. The first concerns the definitions of residence and mobility: it seems to me that all the contributors have assumed that intra-EU migration is pretty much limited to the movement of citizens from one Member-State to another where they establish residence and then remain there, hence the apparent suitability of Bauböck’s proposal of the acquisition of dual nationality as being the optimum scenario for this category of individuals. Yet the reality of mobility for a growing number of EU citizens, especially younger adults, is more fluid and complex than this, often involving a chain of moves from one country to another, with more or less extended periods of residence according to circumstances. I am thinking for example of a German friend, who has lived in the UK for ten years, having lived previously in Spain and France for six years each. How would any of David Owen’s options cater for this kind of situation? And what of the young student, already having dual nationality through his/her parents, who decides to settle after a successful Erasmus experience in a third EU country: should he/she be allowed to take a third (or more) nationality? As regards the definition of residence, here too, with the growth of lifestyle migration, the concept has become much more fluid: the circumstances of some of the British residents in France that I interviewed revealed in many cases a highly complex residential status and there was significant evidence of what Groenendijk refers to as ‘hiding their migration’, either from the host country or that of their nationality, usually for reasons relating to health care or tax issues. How should residence be defined and proven? Fiscal registration? Electoral registration? Medical registration? There is currently no minimum requirement in terms of length of residence for registration for local elections, but for national elections, the five year period would seem to be reasonable; however, ex-pats who ­typically work to five year contracts, often moving from one country to © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_15 73