C'est le vote!

One interesting aspect of our time here in Paris has been that 2012 is a presidential election year for both France and the United States.  While we couldn’t vote in the French election, we made sure to request absentee ballots for the election in the U.S.  The Federal Voting Assistance Program has materials for U.S. citizens living outside the country (including active duty service members and their families) to use in requesting and submitting absentee ballots.  

I filled out our ballot requests and mailed them in while we were in Chicago in September.  U.S. citizens living outside the country request an absentee ballot from their last state of residence and each state has its own process for absentee voting.  Illinois allows voters to elect to receive absentee ballots by email, paper mail, or fax.  We requested both email and paper mail and received emails with all of the ballot materials attached as pdfs within a week of sending in the ballot requests.  Our paper copies took a little longer to reach France, but we were excited to see that they included very official-looking ballots.

We were even more excited to learn that we could submit our absentee ballots at a drop-box in the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  For two people who are always very enthusiastic voters, the more elaborate the ballot submission process, the better!  Absentee ballots need to be postmarked by November 5 in order to be counted.  By submitting our ballots to the drop box at the embassy, we did not need to pay international postage and had an excuse to visit the embassy.

We stopped by the embassy one morning this week before J went to work.  It seemed appropriate that we overheard two people with foreign accents energetically discussing the most recent debate on our way to drop off our ballots.  When we arrived at the embassy, it was a little confusing trying to figure out how exactly to get in to drop off our ballots.  The first set of guards that we encountered to did not seem to speak English very well and I had not thought to look up vocabulary related to embassies or voting.  It turns out that the words for vote and election are almost the same in French and English, but I managed to avoid saying either of those words and kept mentioning ballots (which did not help).  It took J blurting out “Obama!” while I pointed at the envelopes containing our ballots to get us directions to the correct entrance.  

When we eventually reached the place where the ballot drop box was stored and the security guard realized what we were looking for, she exclaimed, “C’est le vote!”  After confirming that the names on the envelopes containing the ballots matched our passports and verifying that the passports matched our faces, we were given a box to slide our ballots into.  The security guards in the room all applauded while we “voted.”  We concluded our somewhat confusing embassy experience by getting chastised by a guard for trying to take a picture of the building.

While we have already voted, Election Day is still almost two weeks away in the U.S.  For those of you in Illinois, the Chicago Council of Lawyers is a non-partisan public interest bar association that has prepared judicial evaluations of state judges seeking election or retention on the November 6, 2012 ballot.  Those materials are currently available online.