Courting the expatriate vote

The Overseas Vote Foundation is seeing high levels of activity on its Web site, as well as 16 other OVF hosted sites offering registration and voting assistance to the estimated 6 million military personnel and civilians living overseas.

With a tight presidential race expected, the U.S. expatriate vote is a constituency that cannot be ignored; both the Obama and McCain campaigns are incorporating OVF sites in their efforts to get the vote out, said OVF President Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat. The foundation has registered nearly 90,000 voters for this year’s election.

In addition to its own Web site and those used by the campaigns, both political parties and a number of states also are using OVF online services to provide information and forms for voter registration, downloadable federal absentee ballots and discount rates on express mailing of completed ballots to home precincts. The sites have received more than 2 million visits this year, and during September they were averaged 25,000 visitors a day.

Voting already has begun using the Vote-Print-Mail Ballot system that generates voter-specific absentee ballots customized according to the voter’s home ZIP code. An Express Your Vote program gives discounted FedEx rates for shipping these forms to stateside election officials.

“It’s taking off,” said Dzieduszycka-Suinat. “It’s really picked up in the last three days,” especially from some Asian countries, where shipping is free.

The applications hosted by OVF were created with help from a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust’s Make Voting Work initiative and the JEHT Foundation to encourage participation in elections by service members living abroad or away from home in this country or Americans living overseas. Casting votes traditionally has been difficult for them, primarily because of delays in getting ballots delivered from local election officials and returning them in time to be counted.

The Election Assistance Commission reported in 2007 that only about 992,000 absentee ballots were requested by this group in 2006, and only slightly more than 330,000 of these were cast or counted. The most common reason for requested ballots not being cast, 70 percent, was that mailed ballots were returned as undeliverable.