# Are soldiers at war generally permitted to vote in national elections?

This might initially sound like an absurd question due to nations like Ukraine's law automatically extending presidential and prime ministerial terms until any war has concluded, if martial law is enacted.

However, in the case of Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO), conscripts and volunteer non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers alike were at war in and outside of Russian territory during a national election. According to _War-time electoral pact (Wikipedia)_ , this should also apply to the United Kingdom during the 1st and 2nd world wars.

I can imagine that the logistics stress would be problematic. Consequently, in nations which hold elections during wartime, are combat personnel generally permitted to vote? If so, how, and why?

Unless stated otherwise soldiers are citizens and if citizens are allowed to vote (not a given there, are dictatorships or segregated societies where that might not be the case), then in a democracy soldiers are consequently also allowed to vote.

Now obviously being at war creates a lot of problems doing so, many of which are more pragmatic than ideological. So it's not that there is a law that mandates that people on a special military operation are allowed to vote, but soldiers in a war aren't. It's probably more of a problem of:

  * Is your country in ruins?
  * Are there areas under occupation? Like how would Ukrainians in Crimea vote?
  * Is your country an active battle ground?
  * Are there whole areas which are not safe to enter or leave?
  * Is it safe for people to gather at one location?
  * Is the postal infrastructure still intact to do voting by mail?
  * Do you know where people live and whether they are still alive?
  * Like you'd need to notify people of an upcoming election
  * Do you have the resources to organize an election?
  * Could you afford a new government making major changes?
  * Is your government still in command anyway?
  * Or did the military already seize control due to real or pretextual urgency



So for obvious reasons when a country does a spec ops operation (limited operation by highly trained soldiers, not a war you don't want to call that way), then the rest of the country is largely untouched by that, meaning you still have plenty of people and infrastructure to facilitate that. Soldiers could vote before their employment, if that is close to the election or they could vote by mail or they could have a voting booth at a fortified HQ.

Now whether the soldier vote is significant in swinging an election (likely not), whether it's free and fair without the ability to independently inform yourself (though that's hard for anybody in a country at war), whether soldiers are loyal to their government or think it sucks because they basically by definition have too little to survive. Or whether that is more or less symbolic to create a sense of normality within chaos, that's a whole different issue. But if possible countries would probably do it and if just for the last part, to pretend you're in control and boost the morale. Like the sentiment of "I'm expected to give my life for this country, but am not allowed to vote" usually isn't great. While simply not being able to facilitate that is something that is much easier to sell to people seeing how shitty the situation is anyway.

Though yeah often enough in war time there's a real or pretextual supremacy of the TINA-principle (there is no alternative). So it's not really the ideologies of the parties shaping politics, but the necessities of war, so they often agree to postpone elections and whatnot till after the war or descend into military dictatorships without consent.