Inside Moldova, the amendment on joining the EU lost. With the votes from abroad, it passed.

Abroad

Where did Moldovans vote abroad, and how?

At 231 polling stations in 37 countries, from Vancouver to Tokyo. Most were in the European Union, and most voted yes by wide margins.

Italy had 60 stations and 68,489 voters, more than any area of Moldova except Chișinău. Romania voted 92% yes. The 17 stations in the UK voted 85% yes. Russia had 2 stations, both in Moscow; 7,682 ballots were cast there, and 91% of the valid votes were no.

Since then

Did votes from abroad decide Moldova's later elections too?

The presidency, yes. A year later, they lifted the governing party past half of the parliamentary vote.

Two weeks after the referendum, Maia Sandu faced Alexandr Stoianoglo in the presidential run-off. Inside Moldova, Stoianoglo won 51.3%. Abroad, 329,916 people voted, more than 90,000 more than in the referendum, and 82.9% chose Sandu. She won with 55.35%.

In the parliamentary election of September 2025, the 301 stations abroad again cast a lopsided vote: 78.6% for Sandu's Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS). Inside Moldova PAS took 44.1%; with the vote from abroad it reached 50.20%.

The diaspora

How many Moldovans live abroad?

Nobody knows exactly. The OSCE observers' report gives an estimate of about 1.1 million people for the diaspora, without naming a source. The 2024 census counted 2.4 million people living in the areas the government controls.

Moldova's census of April 2024 put the number of people living in the areas the government controls at 2,409,207, 13.6% fewer than in 2014. The United Nations counts 864,257 people born in Moldova living in other countries. The largest group, 218,594, is in Italy; Russia (166,187) and Ukraine (154,284) come next, though those counts include people who moved in Soviet times, when the borders between the republics were internal.

Only 117,326 Moldovan citizens are officially registered as living abroad, the OSCE observers noted; many others are still on the voter lists in the places they left.

Money sent home was worth 34.5% of Moldova's GDP at its peak, in 2006. By 2025 the share had fallen to 9.4%. In dollars, remittances rose from $1.2bn in 2006 to a peak of $2.2bn in 2013 and were $1.9bn in 2025, but the economy grew much faster.

Many emigrants also carry a Romanian passport, which lets them live and work anywhere in the EU. In July 2025 the news site G4Media reported, from Romanian interior and justice ministry figures, that more than 850,000 Moldovan citizens had regained Romanian citizenship between 1991 and 2024. The article's year-by-year list adds up to a little less than its own total, so read the figure as approximate.

Is it fair?

Should people who have left decide for those who stayed?

The law says yes. Both sides questioned whether the vote was fair.

Moldova's constitution gives the vote to citizens "having attained the age of 18", except those barred by law. It sets no condition on where they live. The Constitutional Court confirmed the referendum result on 31 October 2024, in a judgment that cannot be appealed.

The complaint about Russia

Opponents of the referendum and of Sandu criticised how the vote abroad was organised. One complaint concerned Russia. The electoral commission planned five polling stations there. The foreign ministry then advised, on security grounds, that stations should open only on embassy or consulate premises, so only the two at the embassy in Moscow opened, with 5,000 ballots each. In the run-off each recorded 4,999 voters against its 5,000 ballots.

Italy, home to about 219,000 people born in Moldova, had 60 stations; Russia, home to about 166,000, many of whom moved there in Soviet times, had 2. A challenge to the number of stations in Russia was rejected, finally by the Supreme Court of Justice on 25 September 2024. The OSCE observers noted that Moldova had still not set clear criteria for where polling stations abroad should go, and recommended that it do so.

Would more stations in Russia have changed the result? That depends on how many more people would have come, which nobody knows. At the Moscow split, No would have needed about 13,000 more valid votes there, on top of the 7,682 people who did vote.

The complaint about money

Moldova's authorities said the vote at home was being bought. Prosecutors described a scheme run by a criminal organisation led by Ilan Șor, a politician sentenced in absentia in 2023 to 15 years in prison for fraud and money laundering, with members in Russia, that paid voters through accounts at a Russian bank. The police told the Constitutional Court they had found data on about 140,000 voters collected for the scheme, and estimated that $39m was allocated or used through those bank accounts and the mobile banking app alone in September and October 2024. These are investigators' allegations, not court findings. The OSCE observers found "credible evidence of interference from abroad, including offering illicit monetary incentives to influence voters".

The same observers also faulted the government side. Before the first round, they wrote, Sandu, the government and her party were the most visible campaigners, "often blurring the lines between their roles", and they noted misuse of administrative resources. Complaints challenging the referendum result were rejected by the electoral commission and the courts, and the observers found that the results were added up efficiently.

The complaint about the majority

The Electoral Code says a referendum decision is adopted if "the majority of citizens who took part in the referendum" voted for it. The Constitutional Court read that as a majority of valid votes, citing another article of the Code, so the 42,518 spoilt ballots did not count. Two of its judges dissented, arguing that the majority should be measured against everyone who took part. On that measure Yes had 48.96%, short of half. The OSCE observers suggested that Moldova review the rule.

The Communist Party asked the Court for a recount, arguing among other things that the spoilt ballots outnumbered the margin of 10,564. The Court rejected the request, because the party had offered no evidence that ballots were wrongly declared invalid.

Moldova's constitution now calls the country's European path irreversible. The amendment that added those words lost among the ballots cast inside Moldova and passed on the votes cast abroad.

Where do the numbers come from?

Every result on this page is added up from the per-station spreadsheets of Moldova's Central Electoral Commission (CEC), and the sums match the national totals in its decisions exactly (in 2025, to within one vote the commission annulled when adding up). "In Moldova" means the 1,988 stations on Moldovan soil, including the 30 for voters from Transnistria; "abroad" means the 231 stations of the overseas constituency, including three that counted postal votes. Percentages are shares of valid votes. The tipping point scales every station abroad by the same fraction. These station counts are the 2024 layout, used for the referendum and the run-off. In the 2025 parliamentary election there were 1,973 stations inside Moldova, including 12 for Transnistria, and 301 abroad.

1. Central Electoral Commission (CEC): referendum results by polling station; presidential run-off results by polling station; parliamentary election results by polling station, 2025; decision 3146 on the referendum totals; report on the referendum (stations abroad, Russia, ballots for Moscow).
2. Constitutional Court: judgment 24 of 31 October 2024 confirming the referendum; judgment 25 of 28 November 2024 confirming the presidential election, including the police figures of about 140,000 voters and $39m.
3. OSCE/ODIHR, Election Observation Mission Final Report, Presidential Election and Constitutional Referendum, 20 October and 3 November 2024 (14 March 2025): the referendum question and amendments, the diaspora estimate, polling stations in Russia, vote-buying, the dissenting opinions.
4. Constitution of the Republic of Moldova, Article 38 (English translation published by the Constitutional Court).
5. National Bureau of Statistics, final results of the 2024 census (15 July 2025).
6. UN DESA, International Migrant Stock 2024, people born in the Republic of Moldova by country of residence.
7. World Bank, personal remittances received, Moldova: as a share of GDP and in current US dollars.
8. On the Gagauz and Taraclia: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Gagauz"; Moldpres, "MP stresses importance of preserving Moldova's Taraclia district as centre of ethnic Bulgarians".
9. G4Media, "Peste 850.000 de cetățeni din Republica Moldova au primit cetățenia română în ultimii 35 de ani" (in Romanian; in English: "More than 850,000 citizens of the Republic of Moldova have received Romanian citizenship in the last 35 years", 25 July 2025), reporting Romanian ministry figures; not checked against the citizenship authority's own records.
10. Maps: district boundaries from geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); country outlines from Natural Earth; towns placed with GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).