It’s up and running! The 2012 FAWCO-OVF website for user-friendly voter registration…
Once again this year, we are proud to announce that, thanks to our long-standing partner Overseas Vote Foundation, military and overseas voters can register to vote and request their ballots directly from the FAWCO website, using the latest secure technology and benefiting from access to continuously updated state-specific information. It is now easier than ever before to register and request your ballot. That makes it all the more inexcusable not to!
Voters in the equivalent of the 26th state (6 million overseas Americans) can click on the home-page button and go straight to a dedicated site where they can:
- register to vote and request an absentee ballot
- request an emergency Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot if their own ballot arrives late
- get state-specific information about eligibility and deadlines
- find full contact details for their own election official
This year, that is more important than ever before because, in order to comply with the MOVE Act of 2009, many states have moved up their primary dates, cutting down time to request primary ballots. In addition, because the legislative language is not perfectly clear, a number of states are interpreting MOVE to mean that voters must request a ballot for every election in the year (primary, federal, special, run-off…). Overseas voters are going to have to be very fast on their feet and stay informed throughout the election process.
While all personal information is instantly erased from the site the moment you click to validate your registration, certain general statistics are kept on the number of voters who have registered, the countries they register from, the states they register in… This information is invaluable when FAWCO and its partners go to Washington to talk to legislators. It gives us a picture of the overseas voting population and no one is more aware of the importance of 1 vote here and 1 vote there than a legislator facing or having just survived a close election…
It is now easier than ever before to register and request your ballot. That makes it all the more inexcusable not to!
Remember, if you like the current Congress and Administration, vote and make sure they come back in 2013, and if you don’t like them, elect people you like better! Whatever the case, there is no more precious right of citizenship than the right to vote, so use it!