At the next political elections, which will be held in 2027, the digital electoral card could arrive to register at the polling station and vote: this was confirmed by the Minister for Public Administration, Paolo Zangrillo, during an event today, 25 September, in Genoa. From the next electoral round, therefore, it should be sufficient to carry your smartphone and an identity document with you to express your preferences.
Be careful, however: the vote will still be cast in written form and not via mobile phone. In short, there will be no electronic voting, but only the certificate certifying the registration of voters on the electoral lists will be digitized. The paper card will still be accepted and it will not be mandatory to replace it with the electronic version.
The novelty, in reality, had already been awaited for some time: last April, in fact, an amendment to law no. was approved. 120/1999, which inserted the new article 13-bis dedicated precisely to the “electoral card in digital format”. The latter can be acquired by the voter using the data integrated into the National Registry of the Resident Population (ANPR) and, according to initial information, participation in the vote could also be recorded immediately by the polling station operators electronically.
The technical characteristics of the new card, however, still remain to be defined in subsequent decrees, as well as all the implementing technical rules: the digital certificate, however, should be available from February 2027 on IT-Wallet, the digital wallet integrated into the IO App, which today already collects other documents such as driving licence, health card and European disability card.
Finally, it should be remembered that the card, whether paper or digital, only replaces the electoral certificate, not the identity document: this will still have to be shown at the polling station to demonstrate your identity before casting your vote.
The objective of this digitalisation is above all to simplify the procedure: anyone who loses their card, ruins it or runs out of space for stamps will no longer have to queue at the municipality’s electoral office to ask for a duplicate, with the consequent saving of time for staff and costs for local authorities.
