The Expatriate Vote
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
Letter from Rome The Expatriate Vote By Ruth Ellen Gruber Rome In early September I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. X, American acquaintances who live year-round in Italy. They are a...
...I can’t help them...
...We worried that time, distance and whatever else might crop up would somehow preventus from voting...
...X, who no doubt has supported civic and charitable causes, prefers simply giving financial backing to a political favorite...
...Sometimes I was told to eat “one spoonful for Aunt Dorothy, one for Uncle Art, one for Aunt Alice,” etc...
...I never would have guessed that Florida would even have relevance in this election, much less that everyone else in the world would be wondering about the absentee ballots there,” he said...
...Of course...
...This seemed to justify all my jitters...
...Being physically removed from the main field of combat, we followed the campaign from afar...
...The experience, he told me, had taught him a lesson: “No one will ever tell me again that our votes don’t count...
...Nevertheless, back in early September, "Did you get your ballot yet...
...I flew back to Rome, arriving just in time to stay up all night and watch the election returns with my friend who declared herself in love with Wolf Blitzer...
...This is what he wrote: “First, your view that I have to vote because people in North Korea would love to be able to vote, reminds me of my mother’s old saying that I had to eat my breakfast because people in China are starving...
...I think I’m in love with Wo lf Blitzer,” a friend of mine in Rome confided...
...It’s powerful viewing...
...Or at least feel it necessary to have some input into the game...
...Said Buckley: ‘They told me that if I voted for Goldwater we would soon have 500,000 troops in Vietnam and still be losing the war...
...for Europe as students and belong to the Vietnamera generation of expatriates who vowed never to move back while Richard M. Nixon was President...
...Oh, no— we don’t vote...
...If you don’t like the candidates, write someone in...
...If I’m not hungry, I have the full right not to eat the Wheaties in the same way I could pass up more of the risotto yesterday notwithstanding hunger in the Third World...
...I saw them all...
...I have lost touch with this friend, so I don’t know if he kept his pledge...
...and around the world announcing Obama’s victory...
...But satellite TV, e-mail, blogs, YouTube, and other Internet offerings brought us the big picture, plus an avalanche of the local and arcane...
...She had never had much good to say about the CNN anchor, but she became addicted to his nightly campaign program as part of an interest in the election that had become an obsession...
...Almost daily political e-mails warned that if we failed to register in time we might lose our chance of casting a ballot...
...On the basis of my travels, I think it is safe to say that Barack Hussein Obama versus John McCain became the most mesmerizing, most publicly engaged global drama of recent memory...
...In an election, though, it is still the vote that counts—and is counted...
...The registration process...
...Tina Fey's appearances on Saturday Night Live...
...I phoned the electoral board in Philadelphia, where I am registered...
...I’m aware that the electoral system is far from perfect...
...But the package did not seem to include a real ballot...
...And yes, some narrow-minded folks, as so often before, confound the Bush Administration with every individual American they meet...
...Those three little words, “we don’t vote,” had removed these people from the frame of reference in which I operate...
...Like Mr...
...A friend in Warsaw wrote: “America is an amazing example for so many people around the world (and I hope for some Poles, too...
...X sent me an e-mail justifying his choice to abstain...
...To us Americans out here on the periphery, the mechanics of actually voting represented a particularly pressing issue...
...Indeed...
...Both of us left the U.S...
...People in China would still be starving whether or not I ate my breakfast...
...Sure...
...fears that, once filled in and mailed one's ballot might not arrive, and if it did arrive, would not be counted—all these became fodder for anxious questions and endless conversations...
...He had supported the war and talked it up to his circle of friends...
...His tone was rather condescending, to put it mildly...
...But we were more emotionally involved than in previous electoral seasons...
...I even forbore sending him the article a few weeks later in which Buckley’s son Christopher said, “Sorry, Dad,” and endorsed Obama...
...X. “So,” I asked them casually as we nibbled at our postprandial biscotti, “did you get your ballots yet...
...I also downloaded an astonishing selection of podcasts to listen to as I walked my dog down Italian dirt roads or sped in my car along motorways in Central Europe...
...Damn...
...X. P. S. The Web site artdaily.org posted a page featuring 300 newspaper front pages from the U.S...
...Whatever the outcome, the election itself would be a turning point for the nation...
...If an absentee voting request arrived before September 18, he said, “there is a law, ma’am” mandating that only a write-in ballot could be sent out...
...The spoonfuls for my relatives, like the appeal to think of the starving in a distant place, naturally were not to be taken literally, nor even as a five-yearold did I do so...
...I simply received a flimsy photocopied form where I could write in my choice, not the normal printed list of candidates and parties...
...They cheated us all,” he complained...
...Bush crushed Michael Dukakis...
...the vagaries of the postal system...
...We argued, of course...
...The Daily Show...
...X, knowing where my own political preferences lay, told me that even if he did vote, he would probably “shock” me and vote for John McCain...
...I made some crack about how everyone’s vote counted, regardless of social or economic standing...
...The debates...
...Now what...
...It came in the official envelope, and inside there was the official printed envelope for sending it back...
...that democracy is frequently flawed...
...I feel I was cheated,” a Czech acquaintance of mine, the banjo player in a bluegrass band, said last year, talking about the Iraq War...
...I woke up at 3 A.M...
...How could anybody, I felt—let alone two educated citizens with whom I maintained cordial social relations— not want to participate in this election...
...Even if they did live overseas, how could they pass up this chance...
...As readers of these pages know, I have never subscribed to the notion that Europeans have become overwhelmingly anti-American in the last few years, or at least more virulently anti-American than in the past...
...And yes, that votes can get lost or bought or worse...
...X in Italy—and another two months before the inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President...
...After all, history has been made...
...I must say it is very exciting...
...When I found this out I was aghast—particularly since his voting district was in Florida...
...Losing my composure a little, I talked about my experiences living in totalitarian countries where free ballots were a farce...
...They forgot to send me the ballot...
...We have known each other for a long time...
...was a question that was, among my friends, constantly on the tips of our tongues...
...GIVEN my preoccupations, it was natural to bring up the election during my lunch with Mr...
...I remember how we sat dejected, our eyes swollen, as dawn began to break...
...Of course, the vote itself is not “everything...
...At first, I didn’t quite know how to respond...
...Or, of late, like the disillusioned Republicans whose increasingly sour view has sent President Bush’s approval rating plunging...
...They are a well-off, welleducated couple who retired some years ago to a beautiful home in the rolling hills of Umbria...
...Plus, they hinted enigmatically, there were “other reasons” not to vote...
...How right they were...
...They were, however, ways to get a small child to think symbolically...
...From the intensity of the political message, to the historic character of the candidates, to the sheer spectacle of it all, the contest was compelling...
...In any event, not long after our lunch, Mr...
...Rules vary from state to state, but in general, if you live abroad you are eligible to vote in Federal elections in the last place you lived in the U. S. There are Web sites, phone lines, organizations, and even people you can meet to help fill out the forms...
...And the argument skirted the edge of the unpleasant...
...I’M WRITING this “letter” two weeks after the Presidential election...
...I was taken aback, though, when my ballot arrived...
...What’s important is to take part in the process...
...He ended up registering and voting for Al Gore...
...fax and e-mail possibilities...
...Taking me to the airport, my taxi driver saluted me with the Ukrainian equivalent of “Go, Obama...
...I’ve had these discussions before with expatriate Americans, and they have sometimes resulted in rifts in once solid friendships...
...Since voting was a priority, I did what everyone recommended and sent in my registration material early...
...It was still two months until November, but like most Americans (and many non-Americans) I know, the upcoming Presidential election weighed heavily on my mind...
...I thought...
...It did not quite make sense, but I filled out the form and mailed it off...
...Still, I can’t see why one should not cast a ballot where it is available...
...Suffrage can be, and has been, denied...
...Ditto...
...Over the course of the next few days, I received moving e-mails and text messages from friends in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—countries struggling with their own political demons as they adapt to democratic systems...
...policy, yes...
...I didn’t reply...
...They showed that what I myself was doing—sitting at home and eating—was somehow connected to a wider world...
...I don’t care whom you vote for,” I told him...
...This election, as we are all aware, more than 126 million Americans recognized this reality...
...to watch two of them live, but I easily caught the others on replays or the Web...
...On Election Day, I was in L’viv, winding up a weeklong trip to western Ukraine...
...My gobbling down Wheaties is totally independent of their starvation...
...But I haven’t heard from Mr...
...I will certainly vote in future elections, too...
...Yours is a great nation,” a friend from Hungary texted...
...She and her husband and I had also watched the returns together 20 years ago, when George H.W...
...The staffer I reached spoke bureaucratese, not English, but he managed to explain the situation...
...Then, at the risk of sounding like a high school civics teacher, I boiled over when Mr...
...Virulently anti-President George W. Bush and anti-U.S...
...And I pronounced something I truly believe— that if you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain about what happens after the ballots are in...
...We may have missed out on the razzmatazz rallies and, for the most part, the myriad ads, billboards, buttons, and bumper stickers...
...They congratulated me, but they also more broadly congratulated my country...
...Who knows, maybe Mr...
...X, when I refused to eat something as a child I was told to think of the starving children—but in our family the country cited was India...
...In a way, this concern was a displacement anxiety that both stemmed from and heightened fears (on both sides) about the eventual electoral outcome...
...Didn’t they want to be part of, well, history—of something historic...
...Basically, I found that most Europeans I tended to speak with in recent years sounded, in their criticism of Bush, of America, of “things American,” like Democrats...
...It is more than two months after the lunch I had with Mr...
...requesting an absentee ballot...
...I voted for Goldwater and sure enough we have 500,000 troops in Vietnam and we are losing the war.’ Perhaps the vote is not everything...
...Voting from overseas, however, is reallynot very difficult...
...Eight years ago, during the 2000 Presidential election, I had this conversation with a friend who at the time was 50 years old and had never voted in his life...
...Correction: We made history...
...Were they kidding...
...Sarah Palin on the stump...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber writes regulanyfor The New Leader on her travels in Europe...
...I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for making sure that I got an absentee ballot and voted,” he told me later, as the Florida recount got under way...
...That’s a lesson many Americans cannot seem to appreciate...
...Their votes were meaningless in the voting district where they would be cast, the Xs told me, because there was a perennial one-sided outcome, not to mention a record of corruption...
...Second, I was reminded of a saying many years ago by William F. Buckley Jr., who I am sure is one of your intellectual heroes...
...This year we wept too...
...Oh,” they replied with sort of tuttutting motions of their heads...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
