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When Reed O’Beirne was born in a small town in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan was waging a campaign of violence against civil rights activists working to sign up Black voters in the state.
The year was 1967, and the KKK’s goal was to scare Black Mississipians out of participating in elections.
“People were being bombed,” he said. “We grew up in that culture. And it was about voting.”
O’Beirne, who has been living in London for the last six years, was among only 7.8 percent of Americans abroad, excluding members of the military, who cast ballots in the 2020 election — compared with 66.8 percent of voters back home.
Put differently, Americans living in the United States are about 10 times more likely to vote than those abroad.
What’s Behind the Dismal Turnout Rate?
Why Americans living outside the US shy away from electoral participation is a well-pondered question without easy answers. Studies attribute the voting gap primarily to process hurdles faced by expatriates — such as the requirements for requesting and returning ballots, and international mailing delays.
But the experience of many Americans who vote from abroad doesn’t support this explanation. Voting organizers say that other factors, including fear of financial implications and lack of interest, keep expats from exercising their right to vote in local, state, and federal elections.
“You need an existential threat on the ballot to really set hair on fire for Americans abroad to vote,” said Bob Vallier, chairperson of the France chapter of Democrats Abroad, an offshoot of the Democratic Party that has 18,000 volunteers and 52 country committees.
The 2020 turnout was higher than in prior years, but not as high as some predicted. Before the election, Vice reported that overseas votes might “make the difference” because states were experiencing increased foreign ballot requests.
In the end, as detailed in the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s “Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report” (page 12), only two-thirds (66.7 percent) of the ballots requested were returned — representing less than a 1 percent increase from 2016. NPR termed overseas voters a bloc with “untapped political potential.”
There is no official registry of citizens living in other countries, making it difficult to know exactly how many votes are missing in the overseas population. In 2018, however, there were at least 3 million eligible voters outside the US.
It’s Gotten a Lot Easier
Charlie Robertson, a Californian who has been living in Japan on and off for the last 31 years, said the process of voting overseas has improved dramatically since he first cast an absentee ballot for Bill Clinton’s presidential bid in 1992.
Today, the process for registering and requesting a ballot as an overseas voter is available through fvap.gov, VoteFromAbroad.org, and OverseasVote. Some states even allow ballot return by email. U.S Vote Foundation also offers information by state on deadlines to register and send in ballots.
Back then, overseas voters had to get in touch with their local elections office individually to receive paper absentee ballots. And, according to Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, co-founder and president of the Overseas Vote Foundation, the only information available to help them through the process consisted of “a 500-page instruction book with a bunch of incorrect information in it.”
Today, the process for registering and requesting a ballot as an overseas voter is available through fvap.gov, VoteFromAbroad.org, and OverseasVote. Some states even allow ballot return by email. U.S Vote Foundation also offers information by state on deadlines to register and send in ballots.
While the system still presents some obstacles, especially for those living in regions without reliable internet access or mail services, O’Beirne said he thinks voting from overseas is easier than waiting in the long lines that some domestic voters endure.
So why aren’t more Americans abroad voting?
The Myth of the Tax Man
Dzieduszycka-Suinat thinks that expats may not know how straightforward the process is — or even that they have the right to vote overseas. She cited the common “myth” that you cannot vote for the first time living outside the country.
“We’ve had people who were 80 years old who never voted from the United States and voted from abroad,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said.
Perhaps the number one factor driving low turnout is expats’ fear — unfounded, experts say — that the IRS will come knocking.
“It sends a chill down the spine of a lot of Americans abroad,” said Dzieduszycka-Suinat. “They don’t want to call attention to themselves.”
She explained that “US tax law is almost a punishment to expats,” pointing out that America is one of only two countries in the world — the other being Eritrea — that require citizens living in other countries to file an income tax return.
Filing taxes from abroad is expensive, with accountants charging as much as $3,000 to prepare complicated paperwork, compared to $323 for stateside taxpayers, according to American Citizens Abroad.
Expats also face additional requirements, such as reporting foreign bank accounts.
Organizers abroad are working to dispel the myth that states share their voters’ information with the IRS.
“There is no connection,” said Erin Kotecki Vest, chairperson of Democrats Abroad Canada.
Still, perhaps because taxes and voting may be the only ways in which expats engage with their government, the democratic processes of fulfilling IRS obligations and participating in elections remain connected in the minds of some.
Alex Hutchins, a 26-year-old New York voter living in Japan, said that the requirement to file taxes as an overseas citizen feels “disingenuous” in contrast with what he sees as a lack of effort by states or the federal government to include overseas voters in elections.
Not Enough Information?
Hutchins, who works as a sustainability analyst in the Tokyo office of a French company, sat out the 2022 midterms because he said he didn’t have the necessary information in time, and that he’s “pretty sure” the other Americans he knows abroad didn’t vote either. He said that a lack of communication from states in advance of elections can make potential overseas voters feel “disenfranchised.”
“I have a housemate who’s Swiss and receives referendum-related information all the time in the mail, whereas I don’t get anything,” Hutchins said, adding, “We submit taxes, they have our addresses.”
Expats also acknowledge that living abroad can shift voter loyalties and priorities as Americans become more involved in their adopted countries and distant from US politics.
“You Make a Difference”
In October, the author of the New York Times Ethicist column sparked outrage among some expats when he answered a reader’s question about whether Americans who intend to stay abroad indefinitely should cast a ballot. “Would it do you any good?” he wrote. “Not that I can see.”
Kotecki Vest was “furious” when she saw the column, which was passed around in her work circles. She said it sent exactly the opposite message to the one overseas voting organizers are trying to spread: that American elections “absolutely” affect citizens abroad, whether or not they plan to return home.
“And it 100 percent makes a difference if we vote,” she said.
Vallier, a self-described “Democrat in-utero,” serves as the chairperson of the Democrats Abroad LGBTQ+ Caucus, and tracks legislative initiatives in the states that threaten the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
“What happens in America spreads,” he said.
Kotecki Vest’s son, who is transgender, began to feel afraid of increasing discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals when he was entering his first year of high school in California during the Trump administration.
Now 18 and living in Canada, her son is “almost more scared” to return to his home country as a transgender adult, Kotecki Vest said. Notably, he is “terrified” to visit his grandmother in Florida because of the legislation passed there targeting LGBTQ+ people, supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who at the time was running in second place for the Republican nomination for president.
“He always says, ‘I’m legally an adult who can be discriminated against in an emergency room,’” Kotecki Vest recounted.
US leadership in the international community — which changes in character from administration to administration — affects expats as well. Perhaps most notably, experts say that when Donald Trump threatened to pull the US out of the NATO alliance, he jeopardized the security of Americans living in countries that rely on the military alliance for national defense.
Voters abroad also point to how changes in US economic policy could impact their ability to draw on programs they have paid into, such as Social Security and Medicare.
Kotecki Vest, who receives disability benefits through Social Security in Canada, said that if the federal government cut spending on the program, as some on the right have proposed, the move would directly impact her financial security.
US leadership in the international community — which changes in character from administration to administration — affects expats as well. Perhaps most notably, experts say that when Donald Trump threatened to pull the US out of the NATO alliance, he jeopardized the security of Americans living in countries that rely on the military alliance for national defense.
“If you are in Europe, the NATO alliance is absolutely critical to the safety of where you live,” said Chris Tuttle, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations.
The factors causing civilians abroad to exercise their voting rights at lower rates may have increasing effects on overall turnout, as more Americans flock to other countries to pursue career opportunities, relationships across citizenships, or simply a lower cost of living. The number of US citizens overseas increased by 26 percent between 2012 and 2018, according to FVAP data.
Overseas ballots have already swung elections where the margins of victory were slim. In 2000, when the presidential race was decided by a margin of 537 votes in Florida, hundreds of overseas ballots gave George W. Bush an 11th-hour edge over Al Gore.
“American citizens living abroad are often the margin of victory in our elections,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a message recorded for a September 2022 virtual rally hosted by Democrats Abroad. “When you vote, you make a difference.”
Gillen Tener Martin is a graduate student in journalism at Sciences Po in Paris, France. She is originally from Northern California.
