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.
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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. Before Americans can be urged to go to the trouble, though, they have to be found. Campaigners have set up stalls in local farmers markets and at American sporting events, like NFL games played in London and Munich. There’s also what one Democratic canvasser in Britain described as “guerrilla PR,” which involves leaving cards with voter registration information on train carriages or in the shopping carts of people with distinctly North American accents.
But the easiest place to find fellow Americans is online. “Our form of door knocking is digital outreach,” McDevitt-Pugh says. “It’s using social media, using advertising to be able to trigger Americans and remind them that they can vote and bring them to the resources that they need to be able to do that.”
In posts by the nonpartisan Center for US Voters Abroad Turnout Project, Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Veep and Lily Collins of Emily in Paris encourage Americans living overseas to request their ballots. The number who actually do is, at present, very small. Just 7.8% of eligible overseas Americans cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election, and 3.4% in the 2022 midterms. Campaigners say they’re confident those figures will grow. “The overseas vote is a big unknown factor in the election,” says Sharon Manita, global press secretary of Democrats Abroad, adding that in the final days of the campaign the level of enthusiasm has been “very, very high.”
An engaged overseas American might not be animated by the same issues driving a stateside voter, partly because “domestic” issues like the U.S. economy are less immediately relevant in London or Singapore. “Foreign policy definitely ranks higher for Americans here than they would in the U.S.,” says Greg Swenson, the U.K. chair of Republicans Overseas, which is independent of the Republican National Committee. “We’re closer to Ukraine, we’re closer to the Middle East. A lot of us go to both places.”
Taxes, instead of point of division, provide common ground. “[Double taxation] is one of the rare things that we work on together,” Swenson says, of Democrats and Republicans overseas. “I think it’s a real vote-getter. … It’s a chance to get people that don’t often vote to register to vote, because that’s the only issue they care about.”
Yet on the topic of the expat vote, the Republican party has shown its own signs of division. Despite Trump’s pledges on the double tax burden, some Republicans have called into question the validity of overseas votes, even going so far as to file lawsuits challenging them in swing states–from which the DNC claims 1.6 million Americans overseas are eligible to vote (apparently relying on different data than the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which puts the total pool of eligible U.S. voters abroad at 2.8 million).
The GOP efforts were roundly rejected by courts in the battleground states of Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, which ruled that the RNC had no grounds to challenge states’ election statutes. They weren’t welcome by campaigners, either. “I just find that impossible,” Swenson says of the purported fraud among overseas voters. “Having applied for my absentee ballot, I just think that would be really difficult.”
More than just implausible, McDevitt-Pugh calls it “an incredible assault on our democracy…To have Republicans in the very last weeks before the election suddenly challenging rules that have been in place for years or even decades, that’s really a key example of voter intimidation and trying to suppress the vote,” she says. “A challenge like that can be very confusing for voters, and just that little bit of confusion can really dissuade a voter from taking the steps they need to take to be able to vote.”