site.btaIn Austria, Nearly One in Five Aged over 16 Are Not Eligible to Vote

In the upcoming elections for the National Council (the lower house of the Austrian Parliament) on September 29, almost one in five people aged over 16 living in Austria do not have the right to vote. 

Around 6.3 million people are eligible to vote. Almost 1.5 million people living in Austria do not have Austrian citizenship. They account for around 19% of the population aged 16 or over.

In 2002, according to an analysis by Austria Presse Agentur (APA) based on data from Statistics Austria, the proportion of non-voters in the total voting-age population (18 years at that time) was 9%. At that time, 560,000 people out of a total voting-age population of 6.4 million were not eligible to elect members of the new Austrian Parliament.

Over the past 22 years, the number of residents who do not have the right to vote in Austria has been rising steadily, and considerably faster than the number of people who are eligible to vote, which has actually been falling recently.

According to preliminary figures from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, 6,343,976 people are eligible to vote in this year's National Council elections. This is down by 52,836 people (0.83%) from the National Council elections in 2019 (6,396,812 eligible voters).

Almost all federal states - except Vorarlberg, Lower Austria and Burgenland - have lost voters.