Many full-time Americans seem to view electoralism through the lens of civil religion, where "The Election" is a sacred ritual and a good unto itself, regardless of what tangible effects it may or may not have. These Americans fear for the day when their precious ritual is taken away, never minding that the vote is already denied either directly or indirectly to countless Americans.
I myself come from a family of US overseas citizens, and wouldn't you know, in 2022 the voter turnout among US overseas citizens was apparently only some 3.4%, meaning that US citizens living in the fifty stars' share of Occupied Turtle Island and Occupied Hawai'i were 18x more likely to vote than those living abroad. You cannot attribute that enormous gap in voter turnout to simple apathy on the part of overseas citizens, because trust me, US overseas citizens are by all means aware of the impact of American politics on the rest of the world, frankly considerably more aware than most US resident citizens, since we overseas citizens get to directly witness and even uncomfortably embody for ourselves the dynamic between the United States and other countries — and by all means we would want to use the rights that we have as US citizens to effect positive change, wouldn't we? There's about three million US overseas citizens who are eligible to vote in US elections, and that's no small number, is it?
But that's exactly why voter turnout is so small among US overseas citizens, I say. A huge share of that turnout gap can be attributed to the added challenges that tend to come with voting from abroad, and this is not to mention the ways in which these challenges may intersect with other barriers to voting that may be disproportionately represented among US overseas citizens. And as we say, "POSIWID" — "The purpose of a system is what it does". So perhaps overseas voting is so tedious because it incentivizes US overseas citizens to "come back", where voting is easier; perhaps overseas voting is made so tedious because US overseas citizens will carry more radical "foreign" perspectives and ideas, that are way too "dangerous" to be allowed representation in government; and perhaps the barriers to overseas voting are increased or decreased, rights granted or taken away, based on whatever happens to be the most convenient for whoever is in power to hold on to power; and perhaps all three of these are true at the same time.
So I think that my family experience, that consciousness about my place in the world as a US overseas citizen born abroad, snapped me out of Usonian election-worship pretty early on: I see that I get to experience taxation without effective representation, because I'm the one who gets to see the Seppo military bases actually built in my backyard and painting targets on my country's back. I see that this awareness that I and surely many other US overseas citizens have, is a considerably bigger threat to power in old Seppoland than the white suburbs of that occupation zone, who get to have their own sexy sexy polling stations such that they can play pretend that Team Red and Team Blue are not simply two wings of the same bourgeois party.
Many full-time Americans seem to view electoralism through the lens of civil religion, where "The Election" is a sacred ritual and a good unto itself, regardless of what tangible effects it may or may not have. These Americans fear for the day when their precious ritual is taken away, never minding that the vote is already denied either directly or indirectly to countless Americans.
I myself come from a family of US overseas citizens, and wouldn't you know, in 2022 the voter turnout among US overseas citizens was apparently only some 3.4%, meaning that US citizens living in the fifty stars' share of Occupied Turtle Island and Occupied Hawai'i were 18x more likely to vote than those living abroad. You cannot attribute that enormous gap in voter turnout to simple apathy on the part of overseas citizens, because trust me, US overseas citizens are by all means aware of the impact of American politics on the rest of the world, frankly considerably more aware than most US resident citizens, since we overseas citizens get to directly witness and even uncomfortably embody for ourselves the dynamic between the United States and other countries — and by all means we would want to use the rights that we have as US citizens to effect positive change, wouldn't we? There's about three million US overseas citizens who are eligible to vote in US elections, and that's no small number, is it?
But that's exactly why voter turnout is so small among US overseas citizens, I say. A huge share of that turnout gap can be attributed to the added challenges that tend to come with voting from abroad, and this is not to mention the ways in which these challenges may intersect with other barriers to voting that may be disproportionately represented among US overseas citizens. And as we say, "POSIWID" — "The purpose of a system is what it does". So perhaps overseas voting is so tedious because it incentivizes US overseas citizens to "come back", where voting is easier; perhaps overseas voting is made so tedious because US overseas citizens will carry more radical "foreign" perspectives and ideas, that are way too "dangerous" to be allowed representation in government; and perhaps the barriers to overseas voting are increased or decreased, rights granted or taken away, based on whatever happens to be the most convenient for whoever is in power to hold on to power; and perhaps all three of these are true at the same time.
So I think that my family experience, that consciousness about my place in the world as a US overseas citizen born abroad, snapped me out of Usonian election-worship pretty early on: I see that I get to experience taxation without effective representation, because I'm the one who gets to see the Seppo military bases actually built in my backyard and painting targets on my country's back. I see that this awareness that I and surely many other US overseas citizens have, is a considerably bigger threat to power in old Seppoland than the white suburbs of that occupation zone, who get to have their own sexy sexy polling stations such that they can play pretend that Team Red and Team Blue are not simply two wings of the same bourgeois party.