Is a Ballot an RSVP?

On the uncertain returns of voting abroad

Expat Sam Wants YOU / double vision

At the top of the form we Americans fill out to receive our overseas ballots, before we’ve even entered your name, Uncle Sam demands to know if your prodigal ass is ever coming home:

Excuse me? Can I check both boxes, giving odds on each? Call me in November. Call me in January, after the so-called peaceful transfer of power. Call me and let’s talk about anything else.

The ballot request form—officially the Federal Post Card Application, or FPCA—does offer three more options. There’s a box if you’re Military and a box if you’re National Guard. There’s a box for U.S. citizens who have somehow never lived in the Promised Land. Not included: I’m a U.S. citizen living outside the country, and I’m never coming back.

As I’ve written before: Americans are weird about leaving. The passive-aggressive FPCA demands your plans right up top and then drops the matter entirely. The government doesn’t need to know: your plans, or lack thereof, have zero affect on your ability to vote. If you checked the Military box you can vote by email.¹ The rest of us—the soft expats, the fence-sitters, the never-liveds, the gone-for-goods who leave the question blank or lie—all vote the same. 

The FPCA’s question is not a legal inquiry. It’s not scientific enough to be a useful survey. It’s just an old friend’s request for a show of devotion on the eve of a sacred commitment ritual. 

It’s a wedding invitation, is what it is.

The election’s the wedding. The nation’s the lifelong friendship. And your ballot is a citizen’s RSVP.

Save the date!

The metaphor is messy. Elections happen regularly; weddings ideally just the once. Elections require only a ballot, not physical attendance. I only got my FPCA because I asked a nice man in Winneshiek County, Iowa to send it to me.

But these are details. I’m talking about feelings. An election looms. America begs your presence. Citizenship, however attenuated by years and miles, carries a duty to respond. You’ve got three options:

1. Let it go: Bless their hearts. Wish ‘em the best.

2. Send your ballot home: Sorry I can’t make it, but have an amazing day! Love you guys!!!

3. Move home yourself: Just bought tickets! Wouldn’t miss it for the world!!

This year, once again, I chose #2. My return is uncertain. Precious little feels certain to me anymore. 

Winneshiek County promptly emailed me back a ballot. I printed it out at the Greytown Library, where the printer sits under a large, yellowed, and historic-for-some-reason Union Jack. I took the pages home and spread them out on the kitchen table, following instructions like a nervous dad building toys on Christmas afternoon. President was easy, but I texted Iowa friends to get through the local judges. Then I slipped the ballot in its sacred anonymous envelope—no identifying marks inside, only DEMOCRACY—then rode my bike to the post office. Love you guys!!!

I’ve filed this RSVP for two decades now, from four different continents. One still haunts me. In 2016 Jenny and I were teaching at NYU Shanghai, a joint Sino-US university built to embody the cheery, open-minded cosmopolitanism of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Citizens of the World, we were! And yet when I mailed my ballot that year at the grand old post office on Bei Suzhou Lu, I was creeped out to find the counter all done up in Disney gear. The Mouse was then making a big push into China; Shanghai Disneyland had just opened with a castle taller than Anaheim or Orlando. But now China Post was selling Disney stamps? Weren’t stamps, like, government things?? Disney was ours, not yours.

But Disney wanted to be everywhere. So did Apple, so did Starbucks, so did NYU. So did I, or so I thought. As I stood there under the cheerless streamers—all these grinning Mickeys guarding circles of perfect PRC red—I suddenly ached for something I’d been running against my whole life. Couldn’t put a name to it, exactly? Difference, loyalty, borders, limits, home. A vote for Trump was insane. But a vote for Clinton wasn’t going to bring that feeling back.

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NYU Shanghai seems a far quainter notion now. High Cosmopolitanism is gone, and with it a certain cuteness about the quadrennial RSVP. Trump says if he wins we’ll never need to vote again. There’ll be mass deportations, even including U.S. citizens of the wrong color, plus some vaguely defined law-enforcement Kristallnacht. The other day GOP senator wouldn’t rule out banning interracial marriage. 

And yet Appiah, whose ideas I once taught in China, in English, to students from around the world, argued recently in his Ethicist column for the The New York Times that for anyone not in immediate danger to bail on Trump’s America would be pretty lame. Stick around, he writes, and fight to make it better. “[S]kedaddling does strike me as unpatriotic.”

There’s your limits. There’s your home.

What if you’re already out?

Expats: Do we go home and fight? Do we just RSVP indefinitely?

I could do it. A life sending ballots and regrets, until the elections stop coming. As a Citizen of the World, surely it’s our duty, if granted the privilege, to influence policy in the country that still influences us all.

But at some point this is pure realpolitik, not a ritual of belonging. We are bodies in space. Countries are lumps of earth. Feet on soil ain’t everything, but it ain’t nothing either. Lifelong friendships ebb and flow. But if you never actually hang out, what do you become? Bless their hearts. Wish ‘em the best.

At the post office—just a counter in an Australian-owned grocery store—I tucked my ballot into a blue Kiwi Post sleeve and paid NZ$7.20 for stamps. Then I held up the envelope for a selfie, said a civic prayer, and sent my dear RSVP on its way.

This morning I went back to the photo to check the stamps: Tolaga Bay and Abel Tasman National Park, two lovely NZ places I still haven’t been. But now all I can see, lurking in the blur, is the big red pile of Coca Cola on special.

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1. You have to wave your right to secret ballot first. Hell of a choice. Anyone done this?