In parliamentary procedure, election in absentia is an election of a presiding officer of a committee or assembly, when the person is not present.
Julius Caesar famously requested to be allowed to stand for election to the consulship in 59 BC in absentia, contrary to a rule established four years prior requiring candidates for the consulship to be present in Rome: being a magistrate with imperium he could not cross the pomerium, but were he to give up his imperium he would not receive a triumph.
In the end the Senate would not grant him permission to stand in absentia, and he chose to forgo the triumph.
[2][3] During the 2017–18 Spanish constitutional crisis, the regional Parliament of Catalonia voted a law aimed at allowing Carles Puigdemont to stand for election while the former leader was then in self-imposed exile.
[4] The Constitutional Court of Spain blocked the move.