How to vote from overseas

Voting from overseas can be challenging as it’s often difficult to find comprehensive information online about the process. In this blog post, we’ll go over the necessary steps and provide guidance on how to successfully cast your vote from abroad.

At high level, the process is the following:

Register to get an Absentee Ballot via the Federal Voting Assistance Program
Receive the ballot via email
Send back your ballot via paper mail back to the USA

Let’s go over these steps in more detail.

Register to vote as Absentee

First, head over to the Federal Voting Assistance Program website, which will ask you to fill out a few forms, afterwards it will generate a PDF that you will have to send by email to your county Registrar of Voters’ Office.

Most fields are obvious, like first and last name, so we’ll focus here on the less clear ones.

Choose your state and jurisdiction

You can pick the last state and county where you lived before moving abroad.

Absentee ballot classification

This one is relatively straightforward, for most people it could be: U.S. citizen living outside the country, and my intent to return is uncertain.

Residence and address

The naming convention of these fields is a bit odd.

However, despite residing abroad, you should input a US address as your residence. This could either be your last address before relocating abroad or the address of a friend or family member.

As for the address field, this is where you would input your foreign residence or domicile.

Method to receive the ballot

We recommend using email/online here, so your ballot will arrive to you sooner. You will then have to print it and send it back.

Additional information

Here you have to choose for which elections you want to receive the ballots. It may make sense to choose All Federal elections for which I am eligible, so that you won’t be involved in local elections that may be less interesting living abroad.

Send the FPCA form

At the end of the guided procedure, the website will generate a PDF for you, go ahead and download it.

You have to sign it and then send back the last 2 pages of it to the Registrar of Voters’ Office provided there.

We recommend to send the form by email, it will arrive faster and you’ll receive a response faster as well. You should see the email address in the PDF you will download.

Final step: voting

After sending the FPCA form, which we recommend you to do as soon as possible, you will receive your ballot as we get closer to the elections.

Then, you will have to print the ballot, compile it and send it back via a method supported by your county office. Unfortunately, not all counties will support email. It seems that a bit more of them support fax, and the default is to send via paper mail at your expense.