Meet some of the Americans who live overseas and vote in Florida elections

Following Joe Biden’s abysmal performance during the CNN presidential debate last month, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart cracked that he needed “to call a real estate agent in New Zealand.”

The idea of Americans saying that they’ll leave the country because of what they perceive to be an untenable political situation is nothing new, but anecdotally at least it seems to have peaked during the Donald Trump era (although a Pew Research Center survey taken last month shows that more Americans view both major-party candidates as unfavorable this year than in any of the last 10 elections).

More than one-third of Americans — 34% — now say they would settle overseas if they were free to do so, according to a March 2024 survey from Monmouth University. The number was 12% when a similar question was asked in 1995.

But lost in any story about Americans considering leaving the country because of our political situation is the fact that there are already more than 900,000 Americans living overseas who voted in our last presidential election, and no state had more votes come from overseas and military members living abroad than Florida.

While nearly two-thirds of those voters were members of the U.S. military, tens of thousands of non-military expats are politically active as members of either the Florida chapter of Democrats Abroad, an arm of the Democratic Party, or Republicans Overseas, which was created as a 527 political organization in 2014 by Oregon Republican National Committeeman Solomon Yue, replacing Republicans Abroad.

While those are partisan political operations, overseas voters can also learn how to vote from abroad through the nonpartisan nonprofit U.S. Vote Foundation. “We’re not focused on candidates or issues,” said foundation President and CEO Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat. “We always say inform vs. influence.”

Americans living overseas have had the ability to vote in U.S. elections since President Ford signed the Overseas Citizens Voting Rights Act in January 1976. A decade later came the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which guarantees the rights of certain U.S. citizens to vote away from their domestic polling locations. Voting protections for military and overseas voters were further enhanced with 2009’s  Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

In the 2020 presidential election, Florida had the highest number of overseas votes counted, with 115,975 casting UOCAVA ballots, according to a report by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Two South Florida counties — Miami-Dade and Broward — had the fourth and seventh highest number of registered and eligible overseas voters in the country in 2020.

Military presence

It’s probably not surprising that Florida leads the nation in overseas voting when you consider that the Sunshine State is home to 20 military bases and three unified combatant commands. Service here entitles personnel to establish a domicile in Florida even if later transferred elsewhere.

Dzieduszycka-Suinat has lived in Munich, Germany, for nearly three decades and said that more than ever expats “really feel how foreign policy and America affects the world.”

But she confessed disappointment that only 7.8% of overseas voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election, as per a report by the Federal Voting Assistance Program. (An estimated 9 million Americans live abroad, according to the State Department).

Yue says that there are 44 chapters of Republicans Overseas, with members holding monthly meetings, where in addition to discussing politics they also work on voter registration and get out the vote efforts. He says the biggest bloc of GOP voters overseas are located in Greece, with around 15,000 Republicans voting in Florida’s 2020 presidential election.

Diane Daniel maintains a condominium in Pinellas County but has lived with her wife in the Netherlands since 2014. A former Boston Globe reporter who now freelances for a variety of publications, she recalls stumbling upon Democrats Abroad while searching the internet to learn more about how American expatriates could participate in U.S. elections.

“My thing is to get out the vote. Have people vote, and get other people to vote,” she said.

And that’s really what members of Florida Democrats Abroad say their group is about — providing information and access to vote in Florida elections.

Daniel is familiar with the comments by some stateside Democrats who muse that they’ll move to Canada or somewhere else if a Republican (it’s Trump now, but some liberals said the same thing about George W. Bush 20 years ago) wins the White House.

“Until you’ve lived overseas, you have no idea how challenging it is,” she said. “There’s just a lot of hurdles — and so especially if you’re moving to a country where they don’t speak English or it’s not the official language. And so, I do kind of roll my eyes, like, ‘Tell me how that goes,’ because, come on.”

Study-abroad students

Kelly Feenan has lived in Rome for more than 30 years but usually gets back to South Florida once a year. She’s national secretary for the Italian chapter of Democrats Abroad.

“Our focus is really mainly on getting out the vote, so we’re doing a lot of work with universities because Italy is expecting 30,000 study-abroad students to arrive here in September. So, we’re working like crazy trying to get on campus to register kids to vote and that’s a really important thing that we do,” she said.

Feenan recounts learning about Democrats Abroad in the pre-internet 1990s from a flier. “I wanted to vote, and they showed me how to do it abroad,” she says.

Florida overseas voters must request a ballot every election year, which they can access through the website votefromabroad.org or the supervisor of elections in the county in which they last resided in Florida.

If they indicate that they “intend to return” to their home state, they are eligible to vote in federal, state, or local elections, although they don’t have to declare a return date. Ballots can be returned via traditional “snail mail” or via fax, although they don’t need a fax machine to send the ballot and can send it via a free online version.

Florida election law requires that overseas voters be sent their ballot no later than 45 days ahead of an election, and Florida Democrats Abroad members told the Phoenix that they have already received their ballot for the August 20 primary.

Scott Hoffman lives in La Paz, capital of the Mexican state of Baja California. He votes in Hillsborough County even though he’s no longer a Hillsborough resident.

“I’m still a U.S. citizen and I did not forfeit my right to vote in U.S. elections by moving to Mexico, so the way that works is, you are where you came from,” he said in a phone interview. “I came from Florida [to Mexico], so for the purposes of voting, I still am a Florida voter.”

Recently retired, Hoffman spent his career working in IT and is now using those skills to assist the Hillsborough County Democratic Party “doing data number crunching.”

Knee-jerk

He’s skeptical when he hears Americans saying that they’ll ditch their homeland and move outside of the country because of politics.

“We moved to Mexico because we enjoy Mexico, we enjoy the Mexican culture and the people and the area,” Hoffman said.

“If somebody is going to move abroad just because of the outcome of an election, that seems to me be some kind of a kneejerk reaction, at least to me. Wherever you go in the world you’re going to have divisions and different philosophies. You can find enclaves of people who are liberal and enclaves of people who are conservative. So, I hear that comment, but I just hope that regardless of who wins, and regardless of who’s saying that they’re going to move abroad, that they really stop and think about it. And if you really feel strongly about it? Go live in that country that you’re thinking of moving to. But live there for six months, get a long-term rental and see if it’s really what you’re expecting.”

Florida Democrats Abroad hold Zoom meetings to keep up with what’s happening on the ground in Florida. In late May, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried spoke to members, and later this month they’re scheduled to hear about the constitutional amendment on abortion rights from Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for sponsor Floridians Protecting Freedom.

Democrats Abroad have received briefings in recent months from Democratic strategists Simon Rosenberg, former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper, and last week from author and historian Heather Cox Richardson.

With Joe Biden under pressure by some Democrats to drop out of the race for president amid concerns about his age and mental cognition, the Florida Democrats Abroad that the Phoenix spoke with said they’re standing by the president.

“Joe Biden is a good man, a sensitive and well-versed leader who had a bad night; we have all been there with disaster presentations. That doesn’t mean that we are not capable of doing our jobs effectively and with knowledge,” said Stacey Papaioannou, who has lived in Greece for nearly four decades but spends between one to four months a year in Clearwater Beach.

“If we are going to judge a man on a 90-minute performance because he worked and he has a cold, and not at the 3.5 years of really solid performance and what his administration has been able to get through, we deserve Trump,” said Feenan. “If we’re going to eat our own, that’s just crazy.”

This story was updated on July 16 with new information about Republicans Overseas.