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| Making Expat Votes Count |
| 2004-10-27 |
| Subscribers only. Here's the entire article. Anxious Americans Overseas Wait for Absentee Ballots As Election Interest Soars From liberal-minded expatriates in this laidback artists' colony to Orthodox Jews pouring over Biblical commentaries in Israel, Americans abroad are lining up to vote in large numbers, believing their ballots could provide the margin of victory in this year's presidential race. Around the world, the Nov. 2 U.S. election has stirred deep passions among the four million to six million Americans estimated to live overseas. Most remember well the results of the 2000 election -- when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the presidency after Florida shifted the electoral vote in his favor. It was Florida's absentee ballots that gave President Bush his 537-vote victory. The result: Democrats and Republicans are working hard to capture votes abroad while expatriates are flooding their former home states with absentee ballots. As of September, the Pentagon -- in charge of supplying voter-registration applications -- had distributed over 5.3 million applications for absentee ballots, up from the roughly three million in 2000. In China, Democratic clubs have sprung up in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In Europe, Republicans Abroad has hosted cocktail parties in capital cities in hopes of bringing out the expat vote for Mr. Bush. In Hong Kong, Brett Rierson, a 38-year-old former technology venture capitalist, quit his job to spend the past year setting up a Web site, www.overseasvote.com1, which has registered 66,000 voters, 40% of whom may vote in battleground states. But with the election just days away, many expatriates are still waiting anxiously for their absentee ballots to arrive. In S'o Paulo, Felicia Smith, head of the Brazilian chapter of Republicans Abroad, says about half the people she registered have yet to receive ballots. A few feel so strongly that they plan to fly home next week to cast ballots in their former hometowns. "My absentee ballot hasn't come in and I'm getting nervous," says Jill Genser, an Arizona photographer who recently moved to San Miguel. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |