DoD Study Reveals Obstacles to Overseas Voting
Alexandria, VA – Removing a series of obstacles to voting overseas could help hundreds of thousands of voters successfully cast their ballots and begin bridging a perennial gap between domestic turnout and voting participation abroad, a new analysis by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) shows.
The latest biennial Overseas Citizen Population Analysis (OCPA), released Aug. 5, found that the voter participation rates abroad would have been more than 5 times higher (more than 773,000 additional ballots) in 2018 if certain obstacles were removed. That's more than all the ballots cast in New Mexico that same year.
"Our mission at FVAP is to ensure members of the military, their families and Americans living overseas can vote wherever they are, and that they know all of their available resources," said David Beirne, the director of FVAP, which is part of the Department of Defense. "Part of that is identifying obstacles to overseas voting and informing state election officials should they desire to take action."
The OCPA is a look inside the voting potential of overseas Americans, part of a statutory requirement FVAP must fulfill to report on the registration and participation rates for both the military and overseas citizens. Only 135,507 of an estimated 2.9 million Americans eligible to vote from overseas cast ballots in 2018, a 4.7% voter participation rate that is 13 times lower than the comparable stateside population. More nonvoters lived abroad in 2018 than in any individual state other than California, Texas, Florida and New York.
The comprehensive OCPA combines data from U.S. and foreign governments, state records of ballot requests and voting, and a survey of 6,923 overseas citizens who requested an absentee ballot for the 2018 General Election — the only representative survey of this group.
The OCPA found a 60-percentage-point voter participation gap between overseas voters and a corresponding population of voters in the United States. About half the gap — 27 percentage points — could be attributed to external obstacles not faced by other voters, particularly those related to the difficulty of sending and receiving election-related materials in a timely manner. The rest of the gap was likely due to other factors, such as motivation.
The most substantial infrastructure obstacle identified in the OCPA was mailing time, specifically the amount of time it takes for a blank ballot to travel from an election office to a voter and for the voted ballot to make the return trip from the voter back to the election office. Voters who received their ballot electronically, thereby cutting total mailing time in half, were more than three times as likely to vote successfully. While less than half of voters who could submit their ballots electronically chose to do so, those who did were also more likely to vote successfully.
FVAP continues to conduct research to understand more about this segment of the voting population and how these voters interact within the absentee voting process.
The OCPA also provides one of the best estimates of where overseas citizens are located. Excluding the military, about half of the American citizens living abroad live in neighboring Canada or Mexico. Other countries with more than 100,000 Americans were the United Kingdom, France, Israel, Australia, China and Japan.
More information, including the full report and detailed methodology, can be found here.
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If you'd like more information on the Federal Voting Assistance Program or need help with the absentee voting process, please visit FVAP.gov for live chat assistance; call FVAP at 1-800-438-VOTE or DSN at (425) 1584 (CONUS)/(312) 425-1584 (OCONUS); or email vote@fvap.gov. Service members: Remember, you also can contact your unit or installation voting assistance officers. Don't forget to "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DoDFVAP and follow @FVAP on Twitter and @fvapgov on Instagram.
