Cross-posted from the Flophouse. Your mileage may vary on this one. After I posted it I thought of at least two reasons some folks should not try to vote in the 2012 election: Accidental Americans who do not acknowledge that the US has sovereignty over them and those who are in the process of renouncing/relinquishing. But for everyone else, I wanted to reply to all the reasons I’ve listened to over the years for not voting in U.S. elections – reasons that frankly just don’t make much sense anymore. In particular this strange idea that we may have a legal right to vote there but not a moral one. Huh? If the U.S. is going to try to hold us to obligations of U.S. citizenship in our host countries, then we should have our say too even if our interests are at odds with those of the homelanders. And if they don’t like that then they should keep their hands and their laws well within the boundaries of the U.S.
A few days ago I tried to make a contribution to a political campaign in the U.S. and was stymied by their on-line software that didn’t like my foreign address and wouldn’t take my home phone number (French format + 33 1…). If this had happened a few years ago I probably would have given up in disgust but this time around I decided I wasn’t going to let it go. So I wrote them an email and I explained that I was one of millions of Americans abroad and gently proposed that they look at their software and make it more expat-friendly. In the meantime I asked for a workaround so that I could send them money and participate in the American political process just like Americans in the homeland.
