The Global Battleground

The last time Chris Shannon voted for a President, it was for a Republican, Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1980. This time, the 42-year-old former U.S. special-forces soldier, who has lived in Japan for the past seven years, will be casting his ballot for Democrat John Kerry. Shannon is eager to vote because he thinks President George W. Bush has mishandled the Iraq war. But Shannon is doing much more than exercising his own civil rights: he’s also helped register some 200 other Tokyo-based Americans and is leading a group of them to Florida, the state that narrowly gave Bush victory over Al Gore in 2000, to canvass and “do whatever they need us to do to make sure Kerry wins.” His ticket is being paid for with air miles donated by a sympathetic American expat in Thailand. Overseas voters “could just sit on the sidelines here,” says Shannon. “But we saw what happened in 2000 [in Florida] and we don’t want it to happen again.”

The 2004 election has energized Americans on both sides of the political spectrum like never beforeand that includes the estimated 6 million Americans living abroad. The U.S. government has already responded to more than 5 million requests for overseas ballot applications, compared with 1.8 million in 2000. The sheer number of expat voters could make the difference in a close race. “The interest in this election is amazing,” says Ruth McCreery, a translator and writer who is the Tokyo-based vice chairperson of Democrats Abroad for the Asia-Pacific region. “Thanks to Florida, people have realized that overseas absentee ballots really count.”

For most expat voters, the overriding issue in the election is Iraq. But their perspective on the war differs from that of voters at home, in part because they often encounter criticism of America’s muscular foreign policy. “International issues have more salience for us than someone back at home in Indiana,” says McCreery. “Our neighbors are saying, ‘What is your country doing?’ We really see the international bully aspect of Bush’s policies, and people are very determined to vote and get him out.”

While no one knows exactly how the overseas vote breaks down, Republicans are believed to have a traditional 3-to-1 advantage, thanks in part to large numbers of overseas troops who tend to vote Republican. “I think you can count on a lot of votes for the President here,” says Caryln Manning, head of Republicans Abroad in the Philippines. But Democrats argue that there are lots of expats who are against Bush but might not have bothered to register yetnot to mention the possibility that war-weary soldiers might now oppose the Commander in Chief who sent them to Iraq. Hoping to capitalize on such anti-Bush sentiments, Hong Kong-based American and Democrat Brett Rierson set up OverseasVote.com, the first of three websites to help would-be expat voters navigate the bureaucratic hurdles to obtaining an absentee ballot. The website, which provides user-friendly links to a Pentagon site that offers downloadable ballot applications, has so far helped register more than 65,000 people around the world. “The reason for the success is Bush’s [low] standing globally,” says Rierson, a former venture capitalist who has taken to electioneering full-time in recent months.

But even with digital help, the overseas voting process is far from flawless. The Pentagon temporarily blocked access to its voting site from 27 countries; initially it cited concern about foreign hackers, but later said it had simply forgotten to remove an older block. And American expats worldwide have complained that many U.S. states have been too slow to respond to registration applications, prompting fears that some overseas ballots won’t arrive in time to be counted. Both Democrats and Republicans Abroad are busy handing out emergency federal write-in ballots to voters who haven’t received their normal state ballots yet; their federal ballots will count if their state ballots don’t reach election officials on time. Casting a vote from overseas can be “really complicated,” says Jeffrey Wilson of AmDems in Shanghai. “In the U.S. it’s simple: you just register and walk down to the polling place. But here you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.”

Those complications, however, haven’t stopped the political sparring overseas. Last Thursday the Democrats and Republicans Abroad held a debate in Hong Kong’s Ritz-Carlton hotel attended by a spirited audience more than double the size that showed up in previous election years. One spectator was Tom Goetz, a former member of Republicans Abroad whose anger over Iraq, where his son is a U.S. intelligence officer, has prompted him to support Kerry. “I never saw this much interest and conflict among the two sides,” he says, looking around the crowded ballroom. For Americans in 2004, political passion doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.