Mobile Union Citizens Should Have Portable Voting Rights Within the EU Roxana Barbulescu The contributions to this forum have mixed two arguments that share some common concerns but do not fully overlap. The first one has to do with Union citizenship and its associated rights, the role of Union citizens for the political project of the European Union and the boundaries of a ‘Eurodemos’. It is therefore, broadly speaking, an argument about the status of Union citizenship and a particular group of people: the nationals of other EU member states. The second argument is more encompassing and concerns non-citizens who otherwise obey laws and pay taxes but have no voting rights. One way to enfranchise these people is for member states and the EU to grant residents voting rights and this is what the European Citizenship Initiative ‘Let me vote’ proposes. The other way to achieve this result is by naturalisation – an option for which Rainer Bauböck, David Owen and Kees Groenendijk have argued convincingly. It is important to point out that naturalisation is an individual method of enfranchisement not a collective one. What both these methods seek to accomplish is to transform these persons from subjects into active citizens and thus to redress what Owen calls the democratic wrong. In other words, this argument is primarily about democratic deficit and the tensions and ills it causes in liberal democracies where not all their people have the right to vote. This is a general argument and it applies not only to Union citizens but to all disenfranchised persons including non-EU migrants. Furthermore, this argument applies not only to EU member states but to all liberal democracies. If political rights need to be extended in order to fix the democratic deficit, then all residents and not only Union citizens should acquire these rights. But doing so one has to be aware that, as Dimitry Kochenov warns, that this exercise would only lead to another problem: the ‘who are the people’ question. The matter at hands is, however, not about the general democratic deficit in societies of immigration, but about European integration and the pivotal role Union citizenship plays for the European Union project. I propose therefore an argument for portable political rights for mobile Union citizens. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_17 81