Few voters are as easily overlooked as Americans living outside the United States. This population –of émigres, military personnel, dual citizens, and people born outside the U.S. to American parents–is both disparate and elusive. It is thought to number at least 4.4 million people, some 2.8 million of whom are eligible to vote in U.S. elections. Historically, only a small fraction actually do.
But as those elections have grown tighter, Democrats and Republicans alike are looking everywhere for the votes that might turn out to be the margin of victory–including abroad. This year, ror the first time in a presidential cycle, the Democratic National Committee has given Democrats Abroad, the international arm of the party, $300,000 to fund its get-out-the-vote effort. On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump last month signaled expats’ potentially pivotal place in the outcome when he pledged to end the requirement that Americans living overseas file a U.S. tax return–an obligation regarded as “double taxation” among expatriate U.S. citizens who also pay taxes to the country where they reside. Democrat and Republican expats have been campaigning for decades to end it.
Polls put Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in a dead heat, and the last time Americans voted for a president, in 2020, some swing states were decided by as little as 10,000 votes. “In Georgia, as well as in Arizona, we saw the number of votes from abroad more than covered Biden’s margin of victory,” says Martha McDevitt-Pugh, the Netherlands-based international chair of Democrats Abroad.“If we can get out the votes of Americans abroad, we can make a real difference.”
It can be a difficult group to mobilize, partly because voting from overseas is fairly involved: You must request an absentee ballot from the last state where you lived (your “voting home”), and return it (electronically in some states, in others by mail) by the state’s absentee deadline….
