Many U.S. Youths Abroad Are Denied
By Meg Bortin
Published March 9th 2004 in International Herald Tribune- Paris
PARIS Many overseas Americans - possibly
thousands - may not be able to vote in this year's presidential
election because of an omission during the latest round of U.S.
electoral reform, according to U.S. officials and organizations
representing Americans abroad.
Left out of the Help America Vote
Act of 2002 were young Americans who have never lived in the United
States but who do have U.S. citizenship through an American parent.
While
some states allow these youths to register at the voting address of
their parents, more than three-quarters of the states do not, leaving a
significant slice of U.S. citizens abroad effectively disfranchised as
they come of age.
"There is no federal legislation on this at
present," said Polli Brunelli, director of the Federal Voting
Assistance Program. "The states are the ones who administer elections.
They pass the laws on voting."
Twelve states allow Americans who
have always resided abroad and are children of U.S. citizens to use a
parent's voting address, Brunelli said in a telephone interview from
Washington. The states are Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa,
Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee,
West Virginia and Wisconsin.
As for the 38 other states, voting
advocates say that the rules are diverse - so diverse, in fact, that it
is not clear whether some states even address the issue of foreign-born
and raised children of U.S. citizens.
So if the parents are
registered in one of those 38 states, will first-time overseas voters
be able to cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election?
"That's what
they have to find out," said Glenn Flood, a spokesman for the U.S.
Defense Department, which runs the Federal Voting Assistance Program.
"They have to submit their application to register, and the state will
tell them what the stipulations are."
The number of young voters
who may be unable to exercise their right to vote is unknown, Flood
said by telephone from Washington, because "we don't track U.S.
citizens overseas."
There is no precise count of Americans
abroad, although a U.S. census experiment is under way in three
countries - France, Kuwait and Mexico - as a prelude to possibly
including overseas citizens in the next full U.S. census in 2010.
Estimates
vary. According to Flood, potential voters overseas - civilians,
military forces and their families - number six million. Organizations
representing Americans abroad put the number of civilians overseas at
4.1 million.
Of those, the number who have always lived abroad
and have turned 18 since the last presidential election in 2000 - when
overseas absentee ballots became an issue in the Bush-Gore count - is
unknown.
"There could be thousands in that category," said Lucy
Laederich, a Paris-based nonpartisan advocate for overseas Americans.
"But of course we'll never know until we're counted in the census."
Barbara
Stern, the Paris-based voting director of the Association of Americans
Resident Overseas, said that many people had been asking this year
about how to register their children.
"The problem about
Americans overseas is that the numbers are wildly uncertain and nobody
has cared," she said. "Now, with the interest in overseas voting, and
increasing numbers of absentee overseas voters, there is interest in
Washington in trying to identify who we are."
How much interest
is open to question, however. When the U.S. Congress tackled election
reform in the wake of the problems encountered in the Bush-Gore contest
in 2000, "overseas voters were not even included in the Senate bill"
until the day before its passage, when Senator John Rockefeller,
Democrat of West Virginia, introduced an amendment, Laederich said.
Rockefeller
and two New York congressmen, Representatives Tom Reynolds, Republican,
and Carolyn Mahoney, Democrat, had sponsored earlier bills that did
take account of the concerns of Americans abroad, with provisions to
simplify state rules on voting, eliminate notarization requirements and
collect data on overseas citizens.
But by the time the House and
Senate reached a compromise and adopted the Help America Vote Act, some
measures sought by overseas groups, including allowing Americans who
have never lived in the States to register at the voting address of
their parents, had fallen by the wayside.
The act, signed into
law by President George W. Bush one week before the November 2002
congressional election, "was designed to ensure that each eligible
citizen would have an equal opportunity to cast a vote and have that
vote counted," said Veronica Gillespie, elections counsel with the
Senate Rules and Administration Committee, who worked on the
legislation.
However, she added, "the Help America Vote Act has
as a guiding principle that it would not change the role of the states
in conducting federal, state and local elections. This means the act
did not introduce a federal law that governed eligibility requirements
for voter registration, voting or counting votes. State law controls
voter eligibility."
Brunelli, of the Federal Voting Assistance
Program, said the program had asked the 38 states that have not yet
done so "to pass legislation to enfranchise those U.S. citizens who
have never resided in the States."
In the meantime, citizens
abroad who find themselves unable to register may challenge their state
law under a complaints process, said Gillespie, speaking by phone from
Washington.
People who feel they have been disfranchised, she
said, can turn to a law that will permit them to file a complaint with
the relevant state.
Again, however, the modalities of the
complaints are up to the states. While some may post regulations on the
Internet, making them accessible to overseas voters, others may post
them on the statehouse door - and there is no guarantee that a voter
who files a challenge will win.
On the positive front, said
Laederich, the advocate for overseas Americans, it has become easier
since 2000 to get registration forms and request ballots online. For
most states, the Federal Post Card Application needed to register as an
absentee can be obtained at www.fvap.gov/pubs/onlinefpca.html.
Another
advance is that the Help America Vote Act extended the registration
period for overseas voters to four years, so that registering now for
the Nov. 2 election will also entitle voters to cast ballots in the
2006 congressional elections.
Flood, too, spoke of a rebirth of
citizen interest and said that many more people have been calling in
this year for information from the Federal Voting Assistance Program.
Toll-free numbers exist in 64 countries to allow Americans to contact
the program, which can patch them through to their local voting
district. The numbers can be obtained online at
www.fvap.gov/services/tollfree.html.
fawco.org has a full
panoply of information about voting for overseas Americans, with links
to many other sites. www.fvap.gov is the official site of the Federal
Voting Assistance Program.
www.census.gov/overseas04 is the U.S.
Census Bureau's site for overseas Americans in France, Kuwait and
Mexico who wish to take part in the February-July test census.