I am an American living in Budapest, Hungary. I am registered to vote in Orange County, California, and for a long time I debated whether or not I should go through the trouble of trying to vote because Biden is obviously going to win California. After much persuading from my family in California about the need to send a landslide message, I decided to go through the process of voting from abroad.
After checking my registration at the Orange County Registrar’s office to confirm that I was registered to vote there still (I’ve been in Hungary for almost ten years now), I went to votefromabroad.org to see what I needed to do. I followed their instructions, downloading the form I filled out online and emailed it to the OC Registrar’s office. And then I waited. And waited.
After checking my spam, social and promotional folders every day for two weeks and not receiving anything, I decided to try to find out what happened. I went to the OC Registrar’s Website and initiated an online chat to try to resolve the situation.
Long story short, after much back and forth about how I should be able to do this and should be able to do that, none of which I could do, it was determined that I was not registered in Orange County. Huh. And I just checked a few weeks ago to make sure that I was. So I went to my voter information file, and it turns out that they received my ballot request from Hungary because they had my foreign address on file, correctly filled out, I might add, which is not so easy when dealing with strange address forms and weird foreign spellings. The thing that they did NOT get right, however, was my name. They misspelled my last name. So instead of being Mouse That Roared, I was now Mouse That Oared, where “Oared” was my last name. This one simple clerical “error” would have prevented me from ever receiving a ballot unless I had taken the time to research why I hadn’t received a ballot myself.
And it’s not like my last name is as difficult as “Roared” to input. It’s four letters. Orange County is a former bastion of the Republican party in California, and I am a lifelong registered Democrat. Maybe it was just a simple mistake. Someone managed to input Hungária krt. 1234 #14, Budapest, Hungary, correctly, but couldn’t manage to get the most important part of the information down correctly.
Anyway, with the help of the wonderful woman with whom I chatted, I was able to get everything fixed, so hopefully I will receive my online ballot by Monday at the latest. If I haven’t received it by then, you can be sure that I will be following up to see what happened.
So, if you live abroad and are reading this, if you have not heard back from your jurisdiction about your ballot request, please follow up. Maybe you are the victim on an innocent “mistake,” or maybe you are the victim of voter disenfranchisement. And if you suspect you are the latter, please follow up with your local democratic organization. I notified the Democratic Party of Orange County about this just in case there is someone at the OC Registrar’s office that thinks he can make easily explainable clerical “errors” that keep Democrats abroad from being able to vote.
Every vote counts. Every vote for Biden is an affirmation of who we are as a party and a rejection of everything Trump and the Republican party are.
