When Use It or Lose It Means Traveling 9,300 Miles to Vote
Before she left for the Bangalore airport on Tuesday, Susan Scott-Ker checked the mail one final time.
Nothing.
For nearly a month, she and her husband had been waiting for their New York State absentee ballots to arrive in India, where she has been working since the summer. A week ago, they realized that even if the ballots arrived before the election — a proposition that was growing more dubious by the minute — they had almost no chance of getting them back in time to be counted.
They had already called the American Consulate, to no avail, and had looked into hiring a round-trip courier service.
“We had a long talk about it,” Ms. Scott-Ker said. “We could go on holiday to a beach somewhere. Or we could come back here and vote. It was a long talk. We decided it was important to stand up and be counted.
“We bought the tickets that Friday, the 24th.”
On Tuesday evening, she and her husband caught a flight from Bangalore to New Delhi, about 1,100 miles. The next leg of the journey, 7,500 miles, took them to Chicago. By 5:30 on Wednesday morning, they had cleared immigration and customs at O’Hare International Airport, and flew the last 700 miles to La Guardia. Their journey of 9,300 miles had taken 22 hours.
It is possible for a traveler to go farther in one direction on earth — but not much. When all their expenses are counted, their trip will have cost them about $5,000, Ms. Scott-Ker said.
Experts say Americans are showing more interest and passion about this election than they have in nearly 50 years. But it is still likely that one-third of the eligible voters will not take part — much less spend two full days traveling around the world to do so.
For Ms. Scott-Ker, 45, a native of New Zealand, and her husband, who was born in Morocco, the votes they intend to cast on Tuesday in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan will be their first, ever. They became American citizens on Nov. 30, 2007.
“We became citizens so we could vote,” Ms. Scott-Ker said. “We’d lived here 13 years on green cards, paid lots of tax money, but you have no voice within the system.”
A few months after they were sworn in as citizens, Ms. Scott-Ker was transferred to Bangalore by her employer, Accenture, a management consulting, technology and outsourcing company, as its marketing director for India. She kept her eye on the election, filing the voter registration forms in August and getting the confirmation in early October. Then she discovered that an absentee ballot would require a separate application to the city Board of Elections.
“In this highly technological age and city, do we need to be mailing applications halfway around the world, just so you can get a piece of mail sent back to the same place?” Ms. Scott-Ker wondered aloud.
In a word, yes. So, she said, she followed the requirements “to the letter. I even provided an addressed envelope for the ballot to be sent back to us so it would be absolutely perfect, as it would have to have been for the India postal service.”
Still, no ballots came. The Board of Elections in Manhattan — its funding cut this year in a dispute with the mayor — has been laggard in sending out absentee ballots, officials say. Ms. Scott-Ker and her husband, a university instructor, knew nothing of that squabble.
“We realized we’re not going to get to vote, and we were all geared up to do this,” she said. “We thought, maybe a friend could get the ballots for us in Manhattan and have them couriered to India, and we could courier them back. There were so many ifs and buts. I didn’t want a bureaucratic process to get in the way of casting a ballot.”
Her determination is clear. Even so, was it really necessary to go to all that trouble to cast votes in New York State, where most polls give the Democratic ticket a lead of 30 percent or more?
“Then you’re relying on other people to do your job,” she said. “Apathy doesn’t work in a democracy.”
Soon after she got home, she heard on the news that people in some states said an incorrect vote was registered when they used a touch screen in early voting. She fretted that they might lose their votes in one final foul-up.
Not to worry, she was told, the voting machines in New York have been around since at least the early 1960s, and are in no immediate danger of being transformed into digital touch screens.
“I was looking online,” she said, “and as far as I could see, there’s no information about the actual mechanics of voting.”
She thought for a minute. She and her husband were determined to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “Is there a test we can take beforehand?” she asked. “We don’t want to squander our vote.”
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My column last Saturday discussed the troubles encountered by New Yorkers who tried to register to vote using a form supplied by Rock the Vote, which was printed with the address of the State Board of Elections in Albany. That agency does not register voters; under the State Constitution, only the county boards of elections can register voters.
After the column appeared, Heather Smith, the executive director of Rock the Vote, contacted me to say that the state address was on a list provided by the federal Election Assistance Commission, and that her group had twice received written confirmation from state officials that they could receive the applications in Albany.
In a mass e-mail message sent on Friday afternoon, Ms. Smith said she was optimistic “that everyone who filled out, downloaded, signed and mailed a form by the Oct. 10 registration deadline will be eligible to vote — no matter where you sent it.” She urged people who registered but can’t find their names on the online list at https://voterlookup.elections.state.ny.us/ to contact 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683).
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