The Impossible Task of Trying to Cast a Vote by Absentee Ballot for America's Next President

I am a dual citizen of the United States of America and New Zealand. Having been born in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Republic, I grew up within the ethos of unalienable rights and a revolt against tyranny. Despite being jaded by national and local Philadelphia politics, I managed to vote regularly.

Living now, as I do, in faraway New Zealand, as the most consequential Presidential election in my voting life looms, I decided to avail myself of an absentee ballot, which I procured in late September. I filled in the ballot, having negotiated the slightly confusing instructions with aplomb, and mailed my ballot from a New Zealand post office by regular international airmail at a cost of less than a dollar for postage.

At the time I didn’t think I needed to do anything drastic, such as paying an exorbitant amount of money to have my uniquely barcoded mailing envelope, supplied by Pennsylvania, stuffed into an overnight FedEx bag, trusting instead on the international postal system to do its work. I mailed my ballot approximately three weeks ago.

While ruminating on matters political and hearing all kinds of information about vote rigging and voter disenfranchisement, I decided to check to see that my ballot had been received. Now, mind you, I had been enabled to place my vote within a ‘secrecy envelope’, and this secrecy envelope within a mailing envelope that would go directly to a Philadelphia.

I contacted, by email, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Military and Overseas Voting Support people via STSVCSure_Helpdesk@pa.gov, and I was provided with a link to track the status of my absentee ballot, which is here:

https://www.pavoterservices.pa.gov/Pages/BallotTracking.aspx

Every time I click on this link I receive this message: Traffic has been blocked - Please click here for additional voter information. Try it yourself, maybe you will have better luck than I.

I persisted nevertheless and was given alternative ways, a week out from the election, to cast a vote, including requesting an FWAB ballot from https://www.fvap.gov/ — which I did several days ago but which has resulted in nothing so far. I also filed to cast a vote online and have received nothing from that request. I was subsequently advised to ‘reach out’ to Philadelphia County and provided a phone number …

However, the good people at the SURE Help Desk,Bureau of Election Security and Technology,Pennsylvania Department of State (please don’t ask me what the acronym SURE means), eventually informed me, two days ago on 29 October, that my ballot had NOT been received. Hmmm.

During an exchange with the Philadelphia County Board of Elections whose office, incidentally, is not far from the home I lived in before emigrating to New Zealand, I was told that my absentee ballot request had been received …. and then cancelled when I told them that I already had an absentee ballot itself which had NOT been received by them.

I returned to the nicer folks at SURE when I expressed the desire to lodge a complaint, and I was given another web link:

https://www.pavoterservices.pa.gov/Pages/ReportElectionComplaints.aspx

Guess what? When I click on it I get the same message as the link they sent me to track my vote: Traffic has been blocked - Please click here for additional voter information.

So yesterday I summoned up my will and cast aside my venom to print the absentee ballot sent to me again, fill it out, insert it into the secrecy envelope to be contained within the barcoded mailing envelope, and shell out the tidy little sum of 72 New Zealand Dollars to post it via courier back to Pennsylvania. This one I can track, apparently, to make sure it is received.

But whether it will be scanned and lodged properly and appropriately is anybody’s guess.

This isn’t a question of whom I am voting for, but of how the voting process has descended into such ineptitude, either by sheer degradation or by design, so as to make the single most important civic duty nearly impossible to fulfill.

Years ago I wrote a series of essays addressing political reform in the United States, and single-day voting by paper ballot was chief among my recommendations, with the exception of course for those who, like myself, cannot walk into a voting booth because they reside outside the country.

When Bush II defeated Gore because of ‘hanging chads’ in 2000, and when he defeated Kerry in 2004 thanks to the electronic Diebold voting machine irregularities in Ohio, I fulminated. Yet back then I was woefully naive about the vast systemic cancer of voting corruption fed by politicians in office.

As an advocate of fundamentals I find it incomprehensible that simple paper ballots are not mandated, that voter identification is not required, and that an impartial oversight of election processes at polling centers is not de rigueur.

Those who oppose these measures oppose because they want to be able to cheat, pure and simple. And though it’s possible to cheat no matter what system is devised, it is significantly LESS possible by adopting the measures I have outlined.

The breakdown of governmental accountability is widespread, and is often attributed to disorganization and/or incompetence — which I don’t buy. As we have seen, after all, governments can be extraordinarily efficient and ruthlessly competent when it comes to curtailing our freedoms and imposing mandates.

Let’s see if my fancy courier-posted ballot gets where it’s supposed to get, and let’s see if my vote is actually counted.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

October 2024