Liukura Mariman doesn’t like politics.
“Boring, scary, confusing, messy” are a few of the adjectives he used to describe public affairs.
His disdain however doesn’t affect his involvement.
Mariman, a Denver native, is voting in two different elections as well as helping his brother's campaign for city council — in Chile.
“I’ve tried to stay away from it as much as I can,” he said.
He’s the child of a Chilean father and a Massachusetts mother and has had the status of a dual citizen his entire life. He moved to Chile to connect with the Mapuche people, an indigenous tribe his father is a part of and is currently living on a farm in the countryside.
Mariman has made it through one election already this fall; Chile held its vote on the 26th and 27th of October. And he got his ballot in for the Nov. 5 election in the U.S. Exercising the right to vote is important to Mariman, both for his family living in Denver and for his people in Chile.
“Unfortunately the world is directly influenced by whatever the president of the U.S. is doing and all the interests of what the U.S. is doing,” Mariman said. “We're all going to have to ride that wave together.”
He received his Colorado ballot via email the same day in-state residents got theirs in the mail, and, like them, has until 7 p.m. on November 5th to get his vote to the Denver clerk.
When ballots travel by Wi-Fi, instead of the mail
Americans living outside the country are guaranteed the right to vote by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which was enacted by Congress in 1986. UOCAVA protects military members, their families and Americans overseas. Colorado is one of 31 states (and the District of Columbia) that have set up internet-based ballots for their overseas residents.
According to the Colorado Secretary of State's office, an electronic ballot must include a variety of components, including directions for the voter to access their ballot, an electronic transmission affidavit and instructions for how to securely send the ballot in.
County clerks have to keep a log of information about submitted electronic ballots, like name, email address and date the ballot was submitted. They also track how many were submitted in a way that allows them to be counted.
That turns out to be easier said than done; in 2022, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, or FVAP, calculated that the national average success rate for people who submitted their ballots electronically was 67 percent. That’s still better than voters who mail their overseas ballots back; nationally those had a 61% success rate.)
The Uniformed and Overseas Voting Program Manager for Denver, Maysa Sitar, said she believes Colorado’s average success rate to be higher than the national one, given the access to digital ballots. But no one is currently tracking the numbers.
Coloradans living overseas can sign up to have a paper ballot sent to them or to vote online. Sitar stresses that the latter option works well for a lot of voters.
“It is a lot easier to access it on a computer and return it to us that way,” Sitar said.
And when overseas voters do submit their ballots electronically, Sitar emphasizes that all they’re doing is sending a ballot online; they’re not using a web-based service to cast their votes.
“No one's voting online. The ballot is still verified when we get here. It's just an electronic transmission,” said Sitar.
And those ballots are counted through the same secure process as other votes: they’re processed in the same room by bipartisan teams under video surveillance.
Computer security experts are clear: fully online voting is not on the horizon for general use in American elections. There are just too many ways voting apps could be compromised.
However, for many overseas voters, using the electronic system is still an improvement over trying to vote by mail. FVAP said on its website that in many countries, residents worry about the reliability of their local postal system to get their ballot back to the States in time to be counted.
Low turnout, but committed voters
According to FVAP, as of 2022, there were approximately 4.4 million Americans living overseas, spread out across 186 different countries.
That population increased by 23 percent between 2010 to 2018, rising 27 percent in Europe, and 39 percent in the Oceania region in the South Pacific Ocean. The largest population of Americans abroad, though, continues to be in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada.
Of the roughly 4.4 million Americans currently overseas, about 2.8 million of them are eligible to vote. However, the vast majority don’t.
According to data collected by FVAP, in the 2022 general election about 3.4 percent of eligible UOCAVA voters sent in ballots, while in the 2020 election, 7.8 percent voted.
Voting abroad comes with challenges and complications that Americans in the U.S. don’t fully experience. According to FVAP, these challenges include having to update registration and request an absentee ballot, following explicit state rules on the sending and receiving of election paperwork. And on top of it, most overseas voters have to submit their ballots much earlier than local voters to meet election deadlines.
There has been an extra focus on overseas voters, specifically those who are voting in swing states, in this year's election. While Democrats have seen an opportunity in getting those voters to participate, Republicans have gone to court to have some of those votes dismissed.
Back in Chile, Liukura Mariman was glad to have taken the time to get through the hefty Denver ballot and cast his vote from overseas.
“I was a Denver citizen for a very long time and I love Denver. All my friends live there, my family lives there. It means a lot to me,” Mariman said. “I don't know how directly I feel responsible for what Denver is doing, but when you get a vote, it feels like you're taking part in the city.”
