Openai/69388516-b36c-8009-802f-dda9f6ce88ea

This conversation was exported from ChatGPT

gpt-5-1-thinking

User: Suppose Ukraine held elections, and allowed residents in Russia-held Ukraine to vote as well.

Suppose Ukraine held elections, and allowed residents in Russia-held Ukraine to vote as well. Let us bracket the question of "röstlängder".

Has it ever happened in history that large parts of a population voted in a country that considered the voters as their own?

Assistant: Yes.

Yes. It’s rare, but there are clear precedents for what you describe: people living in territory de facto controlled by one actor voting in the elections of another state that still claims them as its own citizens.

The closest analogues:

1. Moldova – voters from Transnistria (“left bank of the Nistru”) - Since the first multiparty elections in 1994, Moldova has systematically organized voting for its citizens residing in Transnistria, even though Chișinău has no effective control over the region and considers it under an “unconstitutional administration” with effective Russian control. - Because Moldova cannot freely operate inside Transnistria, it has created special polling stations in localities under Moldovan control along the Dniester river and in some other cities. Residents of Transnistria cross into Moldovan-controlled territory to vote. - The practice has continued for three decades, with hundreds of thousands of voters formally on the rolls in the occupied/separatist area (about 278,000 registered there for the 2025 parliamentary elections), and between 8 and 47 special polling stations opened for them depending on the year. UNDP - Moldovan authorities explicitly frame this as ensuring voting rights for their citizens in a territory they regard as occupied, i.e. exactly the logic your Ukrainian hypothetical would use.
2. Serbia – Serbian elections in Kosovo after 1999 - After the Kosovo war and the establishment of UN administration, Serbia continued to claim Kosovo as part of its sovereign territory and to treat residents (especially Kosovo Serbs) as Serbian citizens. - Serbian parliamentary and presidential elections have repeatedly included voters in Kosovo. Because Belgrade cannot simply run its own administration there, the OSCE Mission in Kosovo has physically organized the polling stations and logistics, under agreements with all sides. - For example, in the 2012 Serbian parliamentary and presidential elections, OSCE ran the polling in Kosovo on behalf of Serbia, and reported that voting proceeded calmly. OSCE - In the 2014 Serbian parliamentary elections, Serbia reported 90 polling stations in Kosovo for about 108,000 registered voters in 17 municipalities. Government of Serbia - Again, the key point: Serbia considered these voters its own citizens and Kosovo its own territory, but did not control the territory de facto.
3. Russia – elections in territories other states claim This is the mirror image of your Ukraine example (the occupier organizing the vote), but it shows the same structural pattern of “a state enfranchising people in territory that another state claims”: - Russia has opened polling stations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (de facto separated from Georgia) for Russian State Duma and presidential elections; Georgia and the EU explicitly protest these as violations of Georgian sovereignty, but Russia treats residents there who hold Russian passports as Russian voters. Civil Georgia - Similarly, Russian presidential elections in 2024 had polling stations in Transnistria; Moldovan analyses note that six polling stations there served some 46,000 Russian citizens, with the region widely described in Moldovan and ECHR language as being under “effective control” of Russia. UNDP - That is a different normative situation from your Ukraine-as-sovereign scenario, but institutionally it’s the same mechanism: large numbers of people in an area another state still claims, voting in the elections of the state that claims them as its own.
4. Scale and “large parts of the population” - In all these cases, we are talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, sometimes more than 200,000 on paper (Moldova–Transnistria) and over 100,000 registered (Serbia–Kosovo), even if the actual turnout is lower. UNDP - So while it’s not half a country, it is not a token diaspora either: it is a substantial population segment living in an area the organizing state does not control, but still claims.

Conclusion: What you are positing for Ukraine – extending the franchise to residents in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories on the grounds that they remain Ukrainian citizens – is not unprecedented. The closest real-world precedents are Moldova’s treatment of Transnistria and Serbia’s inclusion of Kosovo residents in Serbian elections, with Russia’s practices in occupied/contested territories as an (opposite-side) structural analogue.