Domonkos Polonyi

In the Czech Republic, an important election has been held in every year since the outbreak of the Covid crisis. Most recently, the Czech voters cast their ballots in January in the presidential election. The protective measures taken during the 2021 Chamber of Deputies election and the easing of the rules that characterized the 2022 Senate and municipal elections has already been analysed in previous articles of this project. In this brief contribution, I present the change of approach that the government has taken once again, and I will investigate how the following experience might demonstrate the successful survival of certain alternative ways of voting in the post-Covid era.

Both in 2020 and 2021, when elections were organized at the height of the pandemic, the Czech legislation decided to adopt ad hoc laws that contained rules valid for a single election only. In 2022, when the pandemic had already been tamed, no such ad hoc regulations were put into force. Thus, in 2022 people infected with Covid did not have the option to vote through one of the special election methods that were created for both previous elections.

This move of the governing parties was highly criticized by the opposition, who saw this as a form of restricting the right to vote, even though the number of infected people was relatively low during the election. These criticisms have most certainly contributed to the fact that the question of turning back to the previous practices was raised again by the government before the presidential election of this year.

In the end, similarly to the system of 2020 and 2021, an ad hoc law was voted again by the parliament. The acts of 2020 and 2021 and this new act from the end of 2022 are basically the same, and allow for voters suffering from Covid to choose the alternative method of drive-thru voting. There are also some special rules applicable to portable voting boxes and to those who live in residential facilities under lockdown.

The Minister of Interior explained that it was necessary to make the decision to reimplement Covid measures because the number of infected people might rise to 20000, and the forced absence of these voters could even influence the results if the match is close. However, the minister highly overestimated the total of cases. During both rounds of the elections, the number of reported infections was only around 2000.

The fact that there were hardly any people eligible for the alternative voting methods can be demonstrated most visibly through the underutilization of drive-thru polling stations. In the first round of the election only 354 people voted from their cars, while in the second round the number slightly rose, with 650 votes casted this way.

The question can be raised whether it is worth the money and the effort to keep a system going that is used by such a small proportion of the electorate. It seems that the Czech government is also aware of this problem but instead of permanently abolishing the option of drive-thru voting, they intend to expand it. The Minister of Health expressed that he is committed to creating the possibility of voting from behind the wheel for citizens who are infected with diseases other than Covid on the day of the election.

Should this plan be realized, it would be a good example of an innovation triggered by Covid sticking in the election system of a country. Nevertheless, it would probably not carry a huge impact even in its extended form, since only ill people could benefit from it. This shows that in the Czech Republic the pandemic might have been successful in raising awareness of the problem that people are sometimes excluded from their right to vote just because they had been infected but still Covid did not contribute to a comprehensive election reform

March 2023

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The views expressed above belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centre for Social Sciences.