I’m a newly retired citizen soldier born in Rome and I retired to a colonia in Eastern Iberia in 190 BC. Do I still vote? Do I have any civic involvement in the wider Roman state aside from that in my own colonia? If so, how would my votes be cast?
There were no colonies in Spain in 190. The first overseas colony was C. Gracchus' at Carthage in 122, which failed. Overseas colonies weren't attempted again until Caesar founded several after the civil war. I don't think colonies get to Spain at all until Augustus, but I haven't checked to make sure that's right. In the Republic colonies were founded in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul.
Citizens of colonies were considered full Roman citizens, which meant they had suffragium. Elections and legislative votes, however, took place only at the city of Rome. So residents of towns outside of Rome had to travel there in order to vote. One of the major disputes in the field at the moment is the degree to which people did travel to vote. Not from as far as Spain, where the citizen population during the Republic was negligible, but from southern Italy and from Cisalpine Gaul. There's certainly evidence that it did happen, and that it could happen in large numbers. The Gracchi attracted huge numbers of people to the city during elections and legislative votes, such that Plutarch tells us stories about people shouting from the rooftops, since there wasn't enough room at the assembly for them to stand. Many of these people were Italians, however, not citizens, and the procedure that Plutarch describes is not physically possible. Pompey gathered enormous support throughout Italy, bringing them into the city to vote in favor of Cicero's recall from exile. But the evidence is fairly sparse. For many legislative or electoral votes, turnout from Italy was probably pretty poor, either because these votes didn't matter as much (a shitload of stuff was voted on by the public assemblies at Rome, down to the oaths that magistrates took), or for other reasons. A mandated three-nundinum period had to pass between the announcement of a bill and its actual promulgation before the people, and there's some evidence to suggest that this period helped not only with political communication (which seems pretty certain) but also with travel. Elections occurred at fairly regular times during the year, and there's also some evidence that people traveled for them at regular times. Similarly, the census was taken at the city itself, which means that citizens had to go there in person to be enrolled. It's unclear at what date that stopped being the case and it's certain that many people didn't turn up (the impossible fluctuations in the Republican census figures demonstrate this well enough), but obviously huge numbers of people were entering the city from throughout Italy during lustra