Malta's national airline carried 1,530 voters home for the general election on 30 May. Each paid €90 for a return seat, with taxes and luggage in the price. KM Malta Airlines then sent the government an invoice for €2,981,921. Divide one figure by the other and each passenger cost the taxpayer €1,949. Which cabin on the London route sells a return seat at that price?
The Electoral Commission disclosed the sum in its election report, as Times of Malta revealed on 4 October. London supplied 675 of the travellers, Brussels 396 and Amsterdam 134. Another 325 flew in from the airline's remaining cities. Spouses and children under 18 qualified for the fare too, whether or not they vote. The airline charged €9 for infants under two who shared a parent's seat. Together the 1,530 bought tickets worth €137,700, less than 5% of the invoice.
Set that bill against everything else the election cost. The commission spent €8.2 million on printing, staffing and counting for the entire country. Its budget served 312,129 voters at about €26 a ballot. Paying every electoral assistant and vote counter in the country took €1.65 million. Printing the voting documents for 356,832 registered electors took €1.71 million. Neither sum comes close to the price of flying 1,530 people home. A vote that arrived by air therefore cost 74 times more than one from Qormi or Victoria. The flights carried one voter in every 200 yet consumed more than a quarter of the combined spend.
The history complicates the defence of the 2026 invoice. In 2008 the government paid Air Malta €1,015,724 for the same service, as MaltaToday reported from parliamentary answers. Louis Farrugia, then Air Malta's chairperson, warned in 2012 that cheap election seats deepened the airline's losses. "We cannot afford it," he told MaltaToday after reporting an operating loss of €33.9 million. Governments of both colours ignored him and kept writing the cheques. A €35 fare drew 4,891 passengers in 2013. The 2015 hunting referendum demonstrated that ministers have the power to alter the terms as they wish. Fares doubled to €70 that spring, and early voters lost their subsidised seats. By 2017 the payment had reached €1.75 million for 2,052 voters and dependants. The 2022 election cost €1,931,000 for 1,952 travellers, or €989 a head. This year the bill grew 54 per cent while the passenger count fell 22 per cent. The price per head doubled in four years, and nobody in authority has explained why.
How, then, does the airline arrive at its charge? Air Malta gave its one public answer in 2017. A spokesperson told The Malta Independent that fares followed "a mechanism that has been in place for a long time". Parliament extracted a single itemised precedent after the 2009 European election. The government paid €442,345, of which €251,828 compensated the airline for its €35 seats. Extra flights to carry the voters accounted for another €92,600.
Apply that logic to 2026 and the arithmetic collapses. KM laid on five extra rotations, three to London Gatwick and two to Brussels. Those rotations ran from 31 May to 2 June, after the polls had closed. Allow a generous €50,000 for each, and those flights explain €250,000. The remaining €2.7 million implies a lost fare of about €1,800 on every seat. Did the airline bill for seats it held back and never filled? Or did it charge its highest fare across two full weeks of the schedule? Taxpayers cannot tell, because neither the airline nor the Finance Ministry has published the formula.
That question carries weight beyond a single invoice. KM Malta exists because the European Commission refused Air Malta €290 million in state aid. A state-owned carrier that bills its owner by a secret formula invites scrutiny. Malta's Auditor General has the powers to examine every line.
The less expensive choice, on the other hand, is clearly visible. Seven in ten of the subsidised travellers flew from London or Brussels. Malta keeps a High Commission in one city and an embassy in the other. Two ballot boxes there serve the travellers who cost the Treasury €2.1 million in flights. Labour's own vice-president, Louis Gatt, floated those two capitals as a starting point in 2017. His party had promised embassy voting in 2013, then dropped the pledge from its manifesto. Four of the 27 EU states still refuse their citizens a vote from abroad. Malta shares that company with Czechia, Ireland and Slovakia.
Nor does the scheme deliver the right it claims to protect. A Maltese nurse in Sydney or an engineer in Toronto gets no €90 seat. Karl Schembri, an aid worker, filed a judicial protest on that point three weeks before polling day. His lawyers, Claire Bonello and Veronica Aquilina, argued that a voting right cannot hang on an airline route. The protest cites a European Court of Human Rights judgment on Greek voters abroad. Over 100 countries, 41 of them European, let citizens vote from where they live. Voters within reach of a KM route fared little better. KM accepted bookings by telephone alone, between 8 am and 8 pm. Momentum reported callers who rang the airline's booking line again and again reaching no one.
Defenders of the flights make one fair point. While the law demands a ballot in person, scrapping the subsidy disenfranchises people. Clyde Puli, then the Nationalist Party's secretary general, took that line in 2017. Embassy voting also needs safeguards for secrecy that both big parties trust. Residence rules complicate matters further, and a draft amendment from August 2024 has stalled. None of this excuses thirteen years of delay or an invoice without an explanation.
The proverb sends Muhammad to the mountain when the mountain refuses to move. Malta prefers to charter the mountain, at €1,949 a seat. Three steps, none of them expensive, break that habit. First, the Finance Ministry must publish the rate per seat and the number of seats. Second, the Auditor General must test that rate against the fares on sale that fortnight. Third, Parliament must legislate for ballot boxes in London and Brussels before the next election.
A vote is priceless, but an airline seat has a price, and taxpayers deserve to see it. The refusal to modernise the ballot cost them close to €3 million this year. Each election that goes by without reform delivers the same bill, only bigger.