Incremental Changes Are not Enough – Voting Rights Are a Matter of Democratic Principle Tony Venables It is encouraging to note that the ‘Let me vote’ European Citizens Initiative is attracting much support. As much has already been said and commented upon, I will limit my contribution to just a few additional points. 1. This initiative launched by Philippe Cayla has my full support and I will sign it. As many have already pointed out, it has been successful in opening a debate around an issue that has been overlooked for too long. More importantly however it has also encouraged the EU institutions to start thinking about citizenship as a developmental or evolutionary concept. So far, there has been an apparent reluctance to use Article 25 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which allows introducing additional rights of EU citizens. The fact that this initiative has successfully been registered with the Commission on 1 June 2012 will push citizenship forward beyond the present confines of the Treaties. 2. Secondly, I believe that the right to vote is so fundamental to democracy that any arguments reflecting the difficulties of putting it into effect pale into insignificance. It is simply unacceptable that the 12 million citizens who make full use of their right to move freely around the EU should have to put up with not having their say in their host country. Moreover, an important percentage of these not only do not gain a right to vote, but also lose their voice in their country of origin (here it would be interesting to know just how many are in this situation). Therefore, if one accepts that democracy is based on fundamental principles, it is not possible to claim that the denial of voting rights does not hinder free movement of citizens. Past contributions in this forum have already identified the existing difficulties in gaining voting rights and have also outlined different approaches to solving this problem, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What is important is first of all to grant the right to vote to those citizens who have but a partial or no say at all in regional and national elections. Questions around how and when to do this are secondary issues. Indeed, some solutions as to how to make this change have already been proposed in this forum but there are many others. During several citizens’ panels organised in the framework © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_16 77