Intercepted Email: "Dear Elections Director"

 

This is the email that a Watauga County voter living abroad wrote to the local Board of Elections about his difficulties in navigating new voting rules:

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I hope this email can be passed along to anyone involved with North Carolina Absentee and Military Voting.

My wife and I have voted from overseas for decades. We taught and then retired overseas.

We voted in the Dominican Republic, Japan, and Thailand.

This year was an absurd series of hoops. I counted more than 100 steps before I could attach and send in ballots via email.

Option 1, the “portal” did not work. It did not recognize our social security numbers or N.C. addresses.

Ironically, even though those were rejected, the portal posted our voting record for each time we have voted since we moved to N.C.

My 2nd best choice was to fill out the documents by hand, turn them into PDFs, and attach them to an email.

Physically mailing ballots via DHL or some other courier from Thailand would cost almost 100 USD.

The Thai postal system has suspended standard and first class mailing to the US because of tariffs.

Many other countries have done the same.

I taught computer programming. If I had not, I would have quickly given up.

Supposedly only 3 percent of Americans living overseas vote. I predict it will now be a tenth of that.

The directions in the 9-page form for submitting the documents and pages needed were often vague.

You had to guess…a lot.

Please pass this along to someone who might react.

I'll be emailing our ballots in tomorrow and crossing my fingers.

Nothing on you, just reporting.

Thanks,

[name withheld]