This year, for the first time, US expatriates who are Democrats can cast their ballots on the Internet in a presidential primary for people living outside the US.
Democrats Abroad, an official branch of the party representing overseas voters, will hold its first global presidential preference primary from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12, with expats selecting the candidate of their choice by Internet as well as fax, mail and in person at polling places in more than 100 countries.
Democrats Abroad is particularly proud of the online voting option -- which provides a new alternative to the usual process of voting from overseas, a system made treacherous by complicated voter registration paperwork, early deadlines and unreliable foreign mail service.
"The online system is incredibly secure: That was one of our biggest goals," said Lindsey Reynolds, executive director of Democrats Abroad. "And it does allow access to folks who ordinarily wouldn't get to participate."
US citizens wanting to vote online must join Democrats Abroad before Feb. 1 and indicate their preference to vote by Internet instead of in the local primaries wherever they last lived in the US. They must promise not to vote twice for president, but can still participate in non-presidential local elections.
Members get a personal identification number from Everyone Counts, the San Diego-based company running the online election. They can then use the number to log in and cast their ballots.
Their votes will be represented at the August Democratic National Convention by 22 delegates, who according to party rules get half a vote each for a total of 11. That's more than US territories get, but fewer than the least populous states, Wyoming and Alaska, which get 18 delegate votes each.
Everyone Counts has been building elections software for a decade, running the British Labour Party's online voting since 2000 and other British elections since 2003, chief executive officer Lori Steele said.
Online voting may give absentee voters more assurance that their ballots are being counted, since confirmation is not available in some counties. Everyone Counts' software even lets voters print out a receipt, unlike most electronic voting machines now in use in many states.
"We have had no security breaches. We do constant monitoring," Steele said.
Steele said a number of US states had contacted the firm to inquire about online voting for this year's presidential election.
"There are many, many states in the US that would like to be offering this to their expatriate voters, their military voters and their disabled voters," Steele said.
But online voting has been slowed by a lack of funding for pilot programs.
Some 6 million Americans living abroad are eligible to vote in US elections, but only a fraction do so. Until recently, the only option was to mail absentee ballot request forms to the last US county of residence, then wait in hopes that shaky mail systems would deliver the ballots in time to vote.
The system is so unreliable that of 992,034 ballots requested from overseas for the 2006 general election, only 330,000 were cast or counted, and 70 percent of those not counted were returned to elections officials as undeliverable, the US Election Assistance Commission found.
Republicans Abroad operates independently of the Republican Party, and therefore can't hold in-person or Internet votes abroad.
But it is organizing to get more overseas Republicans registered back home before the primaries, executive director Cynthia Dillon said.
Republican votes from overseas could be more decisive because even small margins can make a difference in their winner-take-all state primaries.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS