One of the things we did not really plan for, before we began our migration, was the voting process. There is a law, the UOCAVA act, which is the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Any American Citizen can vote from anywhere in the world as long as they are registered to vote. That is the law in theory. In practice it is a bit harder than all that. First we had to request the ballot, download it, print it, fill it out and then from there we had a few options. We could mail it back in the mailing envelope that we did not have or we could fax it back to Broward County. Previously we were able to fax in our ballots from Canada. Australia and England. We got some funny looks as we wandered the various cities looking for faxes. Those looks got even more animated when we explained that we were faxing our ballots. After some research we uncovered why a fax is considered "safe." It is a direct end to end form of communication that does not use the internet and that is what makes it more secure. Spain on the other hand has phased out the use of faxes. This presented a dilemma, as most print shops and internet cafes still advertise fax service. Yet when we visit they say that they no longer have a fax. That was a problem and after the third attempt we decided to try another tack. We looked into internet fax services but feared that if the fax arrived from a US number it would invalidate our international status. We remembered that the clerk at the first place we visited said that he mostly ships many ballots. That is what we decided to do and we shipped both sets of ballots in the same envelope. It cost us 50 euros which is pretty steep, but what is a overseas couple to do? We felt triumphant and that lasted three days before I got an email from DHL, the shipping company, telling me that the package could not be delivered. More research led to the hypothesis that DHL will not deliver to a PO Box. So I changed the address vie the DHL portal and that did the trick. The next day it was marked delivered and two more days later we showed up as voted on the Broward County website.
Fax attempt #1
We needed to carb load after all that
Walking to another "fax service"
The pharmacies always seem to have nice tilework
Fax service #2 had flags from Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay
No faxes here!
Maybe we can spice thing us
Lots to choose from
I like the looks of these pepper powders
As we were leaving, this tiny dog was not happy with being left outside
Se we went out to say hi!
Packing up the ballots into seperate envelopes
50 euros later it is ready to mail
We passed a flower shop on the way home
So I get this text that says the package can not be delivered to the address provided
I changed the address online and waited a couple of days
It got delivered the next day
Two days later we got the good news!
It has been 4 years and 146 days since we began our Migration
