“Even in era of emailed ballots, corralling far-flung voters proves troublesome.”
Global Post, a news feeder organization for PBS and NPR ran a story with this headline a couple days ago that caught my attention.
BANGKOK, Thailand — There is no variety of American voter quite so unreliable as expatriates. They vote far less frequently than even teenagers and high-school dropouts. When it comes to campaign contributions, they donate less than 1 percent of the total haul.
I thought it rated at least a short comment. There are only 3. Maybe some of you will think so too. Maybe you can explain why you are sooo lazy, or not! 🙂
*that is because oversea votes are only counted if the race is too close, so most expats feel not worth to go through the security of embassy to vote. Also I am wondering if the expat doesn’t have resident in any state how their vote is counted for the electoral college
– The figure of 6.3 million USCs abroad covers all kinds of random people, accidentals and everybody else. Plausibly a majority of them are unaware of being US citizens. Compare the State Department figure of 1M in Canada to the 300,000 who self-identified as American in the 2006 Canadian census.
– 6.3 million citizens abroad include many people who have never had a US address, and, depending on the state their parent was resident in when they left, may not be able to vote. (FWIW I don’t think this is unreasonable – Canada doesn’t let never-resident citizens vote.)
*Expats are permitted to register and vote in the last voting precint where they lived before relocating abroad. If they have never lived or voted in the US, they may be out of luck. Some states do, I believe, have arrangements which allow those who have never lived or voted in the US to register and vote where their US citizen parent lived and voted. But here there is no uniformity.
It is highly unlikely that the votes of expats will decide an election, but did once in history in the Bush-Gore election a few years back. Bush was declared the winner by some 500 votes by the Supreme Court and it was the absentee ballots from expats abroad which made the deciding difference.in the State of Florida which determined the outcome of the election.
Actually, allowing never-resident voting is more common than I thought: http://www.fvap.gov/reference/nvr-res.html
I voted in MA as an absentee in 2004 and was astonished to get the entire package for the small town where I was eligible – local offices, local referendums, county offices, the whole deal. I ended up only voting for federal offices – the rest of it seemed kind of unfair to people who actually lived there.
I really don’t know how anyone can make any reliable estimate of how many US citizens there are abroad. For instance, how would the US government know how many children have been born of US citizens outside of the US unless they’ve stood up to be counted? For this reason, I believe that 6m world-wide is extremely conservative if they in fact were to include accidentals, births abroad and ‘random’ individuals.
Especially now, I believe a lot of US citizens wouldn’t vote in US elections because they fear tax reprisals.
7 million expatriate US citizens. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney visits NewPort News, VA with 189,000 population and Barack Obama visits Zanesville Ohio with THREE stoplights.
According to the Mexican census, there are almost 740,000 Americans living in Mexico. This number is larger than the self-identified American population in any country other than the US, even Canada. And unlike Canada and western Europe, Mexico has lower tax rates than the US, so US citizens living in Mexico should really owe tax to the US on their Mexican income. Yet, I haven’t seen a single comment from someone in Mexico on US taxation, FBAR or FATCA. I searched online in Spanish and didn’t find any website about the subject. Perhaps most Americans in Mexico are retired and only have US income, or are children of former illegal immigrants and don’t earn enough to be taxed in the US, or maybe they are simply more relaxed and don’t care. But with such a large population, I expected that at least some of them would complain, like the Americans in Canada do.
@Mark Twain, At least Mitt Romney traveled to the UK and Israel, which have large US populations. Do you know if he met any Americans there?
@shadowraider
Ignoring a problem can be a form of protest. I have a Mexican born friend who is also a US citizen, I sent her your comment and asked for her opinion.
@Mjyung I don’t think that’s right, wouldn’t those votes be the same as absentee, they are not counted on election night, but they are counted and added to the certified totals.
@MarkTwain Haha Zanesville is a cool little town, but it’s mainly logistics 6 maybe 7 million US citizens spread out around the entire globe or like 11 million in Ohio, who swing, and in which a Republican President has never won the White House without, it’s more about efficiency.
@Just Me – I couldn’t find how to register.
FWIW, being from Ohio, I have voted many times. And unfortunately, encouraged my son to do so having had no knowledge of the jihad that laid ahead. He never lived in the US and had no difficulties getting registered. 🙁
Zanesville is a pleasant place with far more than 3 stoplights! I-70 runs thru the city and it intersects severe routes.It was a stop on the underground railway route. It has a really cool Y-Bridge.
I think I found the answer to my question. The Mexican census of 2010 counted 738,103 people in Mexico who were born in the US, but the Mexican immigration agency counted in 2009 only 59,996 Americans.
http://www.inmigracionydiversidadcultural.com.mx/colectividades-en-mexico/donde-estan-y-cuantos-son/
http://www.inm.gob.mx/index.php/page/Estimacion_de_Poblacion (see cuadro 1)
So apparently, the overwhelming majority of US citizens in Mexico are Mexican citizens too. They probably don’t even know that they have to file taxes and reports of assets to the US. If FATCA is implemented in Mexico and Mexican banks start looking at place of birth, we might see a wave of opposition to FATCA and citizenship-based taxation from Mexico larger than anything we’ve seen so far. If that happens, I expect the rest of Latin America will support Mexico. By the way, Mexico itself abolished citizenship-based taxation in 1980.
@nobledreamer…
I just typed in a comment. Hit “Post”, and then got a prompt to sign in with my Twitter or Facebook account. I don’t do Facebook, so the choice was easy. 🙂
*Well, for what it’s worth (not much), here’s my comment:
@SwissPinoy…
That would be a good one to post at Global Post. Hope you do.
Ok, got it done. There are now 5 comments.
There was an attempt to count USC’s abroad in 2004, apparently it didn’t go very well. I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing anything about it. Anyone else remember?
@Just Me, thanks, finally figured it out. Swisspinoy’s is already there. FWIW, here’s mine:
“There are perhaps many reasons why expats don’t vote. However difficult it may be for homelanders to understand, living abroad for decades tends to lead to identifying more with the country one resides in. Add the confusion as to whether the votes are actually counted and the fact that there is no real representation, it isn’t really that great of a mystery.
That being said, I voted many times during the 30 years I have lived abroad. Unfortunately, I will not be voting anymore as I have renounced my citizenship. This was necessary in order to protect my family from the overreach of the Congress and the IRS.
Imagine how grateful we are to Obama, John Kerry (both of whom I voted for) -key players in the development and instigation of FATCA.
So please don’t call me lazy. I wasn’t and wouldn’t be were it not for the outrageous actions of the US toward Americans abroad.”
*nobledreamer, I read somewhere that the attempt to count USC’s abroad was abandoned due to the costs. In my view, the best thing to do would be for USC’s to be represented by their embassies. They would vote to elect their embassy representation, get their id cards from their embassies, register with their embassies, pay taxes to finance the embassies, etc. This would result in embassies knowing which and how many Americans they represent, and embassies would be motivated to provide Americans overseas quality services.
@Swisspinoy
What great ideas!
2004 Census attempt occured in France, Kuwait & Mexico. Just over 5000 responses, in addition to all the other problems encountered.
http://www.ogc.doc.gov/ogc/legreg/testimon/108s/Kincannon0914.htm
http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/Proceedings/y2004/files/Jsm2004-000455.pdf
I see that the author responds to Tweets… He has seen the comments, it appears.
https://twitter.com/FATCA_Fallout/status/256632939851440128
http://americansabroad.org/issues/voting/how-are-we-counted/
also see a sample search:
gao AND count* AND us AND abroad
Zanesville has more churches than it has residents! If you haven’t made fun of Ohio, it proves that you did not grow up there.
Each election proves that Ohio is the most important state and that Ohioans are never wrong.
(Except for Thomas Dewey, and tricky Dick attempt #1)
I see zero evidence of any word addressed to the citizens abroad in any media discussion or political talk, despite the fact that each and every state has its block of absentee international voters who could swing the vote in any of those critical states. (Florida 2004 the example). There are lots of communication methods available, and none have been used (other than the aborted AmericansAbroadForObama).
There are previous posts which have shown the blocks of citizens abroad in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado. No media nor any candidate has attempted to reach them with any word. This applies also to the Senate races, which are equally or more important than the presidential election.
Oddly I saw a ad in a Toronto subway car a few weeks ago urging Americans to vote – I should really have taken a picture.
*The purpose of a census is to count the people who live in the country. It was a total waste of time and money to try to count citizens who don’t live in the country. Like looking for a needle in a haystack. No wonder it was a total failure.
If the US did like the Swiss do, and treat their citizens living abroad as important members of the world-wide family of Swiss citizens, they would know how many there are, where they live and have an excellent data base better than any census can provide. Their views are solicitated and many travel back to Switzerland for annual meetings with Swiss Citizens living abroad that help them to maintain their Swiss identiy and loyalty, regardless of what language they speak or where they live.
The US does just the opposite. By imposing rediculous citzenship-based taxation on its citizens abroad, the last thing many of them want to do is to let anyone in the US Government know who they are or where they live. With FATCA and FBARS added in, letting the cat out of the bag that they are US citizens may likely adversely affect their ability to even survive living outside of the US and force them to renounce their US citzenship. in order to do so.
Caveat – I am not offering this information in a partisan spirit, nor to convince people to vote. I am simply addressing the issue of the ways in which US persons abroad are counted/estimated. While looking for some better estimates for Canada, I came across this result – I don’t know where Democrats Abroad is getting the numbers they quote here (*see below), but am offering it as a sample of some of the numbers being tossed around re duals/US citizens in Canada/areas of Canada:
http://www.democratsabroad.org/node/15028
….”As a result, the Democrats Abroad began shaking the bushes for votes among the six million Americans who live outside the U.S.
That includes *an estimated 92,000 in B.C. The 2006 census found 6,125
Greater Victorians were born south of the line. They include two of our
three members of Parliament, Elizabeth May and Randall Garrison.
Many Islanders don’t even know they are eligible to vote, assuming
they lost their U.S. citizenship when they gained their Canadian
passports. That used to be the case, but with the concept of dual
citizenship now accepted in the United States, people who were once told
they had ceased to be Americans might be surprised to learn that is no
longer true.
Not everyone is comfortable with that, arguing you should only hold
one flag at a time – a touchy subject in a nation of immigrants.
(One in five Canadians is foreign-born, a ratio second only to
Australia among western countries.) The counter argument is that dual
citizens are affected by tax and pension policies in both countries, so
merit a voice.”…………