First Time Voter Feeling Patriotic

I voted for the first time today. Casting your vote from overseas is a somewhat complicated process and full of potential ways to screw it up, but today I mailed my official absentee overseas ballot from my closest Deutsche Post office, which happened to be in a gas station.

First, before I left, I registered to vote in Texas. Even though I wasn't 18 before I left for CBYX, Texas lets you register at the age of 17 and 10 months old. Then, I had to request my absentee ballot. This required a series of printed applications to be mailed in to my county elections clerk. On my first try, I sent in the same absentee ballot application that my brother used when he voted from college in the 2022 election. However, this turned out to be the wrong form. Voting absentee from another state within the US is different than voting from overseas. Luckily, the El Paso County Elections office was nice enough to email me and tell me I had used the wrong form. Then I filled out the correct form and mailed it in. For future reference, the application is called Federal Form 76 Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) https://www.fvap.gov/uploads/fvap/forms/fpca.pdf. 

But Texas is very, very picky and will reject your application for any reason. In my case, it got rejected because in my overseas address I had put in the country as Deutschland. Texas doesn't recognize the word Deutschland, so my application was rejected. Again, the El Paso County Elections office kindly emailed me to let me know. Then I sent in another paper form in the mail with my address corrected to the word Germany. Finally, it was accepted!

My absentee ballot packet arrived at my host family's house on Saturday, October 12, which seems like plenty of time to get it back before Election Day on November 5. The Texas absentee ballot is a little tricky. There are several envelopes and sub-envelopes, a bunch of signatures, your SSN and driver's license number, and paragraphs of directions in 6-point font. Honestly, I don't know how an old person with bad eyesight could do it. 

As usual, I turned to YouTube for tips and tricks. I found this video from the Texas League of Women Voters that gave pretty detailed instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erNR0pO7RXE. I'm sure other states have something similar, and I would definitely encourage people to look up a video or some kind of instructions specifically for your state or county before you sit down to fill it out. I also looked at the sample ballot that was linked on the El Paso County Elections website so that I could decide who I was voting for in advance, especially for the local elections that I didn't know much about.

I forgot to get my host family to take any pictures of me with my ballot, but I have to say I'm feeling pretty patriotic. I've been a volunteer in political campaigns and attending marches and rallies since 4th grade and have gone to the polls with my parents since I was 3 or 4, but I kind of feel like even if you're not into politics, voting should still be something you're doing if you care about the future our democracy. 

Special thanks to the El Paso County Elections office for letting me know when my application was messed up, to Powered by People for registering me to vote, and to my host dad Markus for driving me to Deutsche Post to mail my ballot.

Now I am keeping my fingers crossed that my ballot makes it safely from my little village of Dingen, Germany to downtown El Paso, Texas. And that I didn't mess up any of the details. I really want my vote to count.