1 post tagged “ballot”
The election is coming up, and I'll still be abroad when voters go to the polls. I thought of this well ahead of time, and before I left the U.S. I put in a request with the San Francisco Department of Elections to have my absentee ballot sent to the American Express office in London. (American Express will hold mail for cardholders at any of their worldwide offices.) When I proudly marched into the office to claim my ballot and exercise my franchise, it wasn't there. I figured I was out of luck.
Then, on the plane from Riga to Berlin, I saw a small notice in the International Herald Tribune indicating that Americans abroad could still vote, even if their absentee ballots never arrived. (Apparently this happens somewhat regularly.) A federal law I'd never heard of, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, establishes an infrastructure that allows the federal government to shoulder some of the burden of dealing with overseas voters.
Most saliently for me, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (run by the Department of Defense, incidentally) publishes an official "my overseas absentee ballot never arrived" write-in ballot and has set up a fax and email center with toll-free fax numbers in most countries leading into it for voters to fax their ballots into. (Some states, though not California, allow you to email in a PDF of your completed write-in ballot.) They then fax the ballots to the relevant local official, keeping a paper trail of where the fax came from and when, partly to make sure the voter is actually abroad. (You have to sign a little statement indicating that you understand your ballot isn't so secret anymore when you fax it to the DoD.) The ballot gets counted along with everyone else's, since it arrives right away by fax, but you still have to mail in the absentee ballot to the local electons commission. Democrats Abroad has a really nice wizard-based web app that spits out a completed absentee ballot PDF, though you still have to fill in your votes by hand. When you combine this with the ability to get my precinct's sample ballot and voter information pamphlet on the San Francisco Department of Elections website and Jennifer Granick's smart and entertaining election slatecard, it becomes not just possible but positively enjoyable to vote from some random internet cafe in Berlin.
