The Disenfranchised Overseas Americans

As Republicans in the state of Washington search feverishly to find illegal votes, by felons, dead people and suspicious out of staters, with the hope that it will cause the gubernatorial election results to be thrown out and the anointing Dino Rossi as governor, another voting outrage is not being discussed or addressed in any way.

Thousands of perfectly legitimate American citizens around the world do not have the right to vote. Why? Simply because they have never lived in the U.S.A. These are men and women of voting age, born of American parents living in foreign countries, yet who do not have the ability to legally register to vote because they themselves have never lived in the States.

OverseasVote, a Web site that assists Americans living overseas, has a faq in which they answer the question Can I vote in U.S. elections even though I live overseas?

As a U.S. citizen living outside the country, you can vote in federal elections by absentee ballot. Federal elections are those for President, Senator and Congressional Representatives.

You are entitled to register to vote in the district of your last legal residence in the U.S. whether or not you ever registered to vote or voted from that residence while you lived there. Your "legal state of residence" for voting purposes is the state you last resided immediately prior to your departure from the U.S. This right extends to overseas citizens even though they may no longer own property or have other ties to their last state of residence and their intent to return to that state may be uncertain. You will need a street address and zip code of your last residence in order to register.

However, according to an International Herald Tribune article only twelve states have provisions that allow Americans who have never lived in the U.S. to vote using their parents last U.S. address. They are Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

As for the other 38 states, existing laws have no provisions that permit such citizens to vote.

In 2002 the Help America Vote Act did nothing to address this problem. The argument being that state laws control voter eligibility, and therefore this is an issue that has to be addressed one state at a time.

If you know someone who could not vote last November because of this I urge you to let them know that only by keeping the issue in the spotlight will anything be done to enfranchise these forgotten Americans. The reason I am writing about this is because, having lived overseas myself, I know of many such Americans. Disenfranchised Americans need to contact the state that their parents can vote in to make their case. Those of us in this country who care (and we all should) can also try to contact their representative or senator about this problem.

The IHT article mentions a number of resources that those interested in this issue can research. There is also a good article reprinted at The Center for Voting and Democracy that addresses various facts about overseas voting.

So, while we make changes to existing election laws to improve our system and protect it from fraud, let us not forget those Americans we have been ignoring. They should have as much a right to vote in federal elections as those of us living stateside do, especially in a world that has grown increasingly hostile to Americans because of the policies of this administration and Congress.