Finding an excuse to get to the polls just became IMPOSSIBLE.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/nyregion/01about.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1225541655-9SfcPOiilMJIiz1YmIE/WQWhen Use It or Lose It Means Traveling 9,300 Miles to Vote By JIM DWYER
Published: October 31, 2008
Before she left for the Bangalore airport on Tuesday, Susan Scott-Ker checked the mail one final time.
Nothing.
For nearly a month, she and her husband had been waiting for their New York State absentee ballots to arrive in India, where she has been working since the summer. A week ago, they realized that even if the ballots arrived before the election — a proposition that was growing more dubious by the minute — they had almost no chance of getting them back in time to be counted.
They had already called the American Consulate, to no avail, and had looked into hiring a round-trip courier service.
“We had a long talk about it,” Ms. Scott-Ker said. “We could go on holiday to a beach somewhere. Or we could come back here and vote. It was a long talk. We decided it was important to stand up and be counted.
“We bought the tickets that Friday, the 24th.”
On Tuesday evening, she and her husband caught a flight from Bangalore to New Delhi, about 1,100 miles. The next leg of the journey, 7,500 miles, took them to Chicago. By 5:30 on Wednesday morning, they had cleared immigration and customs at O’Hare International Airport, and flew the last 700 miles to La Guardia. Their journey of 9,300 miles had taken 22 hours.
It is possible for a traveler to go farther in one direction on earth — but not much. When all their expenses are counted, their trip will have cost them about $5,000, Ms. Scott-Ker said.
Experts say Americans are showing more interest and passion about this election than they have in nearly 50 years. But it is still likely that one-third of the eligible voters will not take part — much less spend two full days traveling around the world to do so.
For Ms. Scott-Ker, 45, a native of New Zealand, and her husband, who was born in Morocco, the votes they intend to cast on Tuesday in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan will be their first, ever. They became American citizens on Nov. 30, 2007.
“We became citizens so we could vote,” Ms. Scott-Ker said. “We’d lived here 13 years on green cards, paid lots of tax money, but you have no voice within the system.”
A few months after they were sworn in as citizens, Ms. Scott-Ker was transferred to Bangalore by her employer, Accenture, a management consulting, technology and outsourcing company, as its marketing director for India. She kept her eye on the election, filing the voter registration forms in August and getting the confirmation in early October. Then she discovered that an absentee ballot would require a separate application to the city Board of Elections.
“In this highly technological age and city, do we need to be mailing applications halfway around the world, just so you can get a piece of mail sent back to the same place?” Ms. Scott-Ker wondered aloud.
In a word, yes. So, she said, she followed the requirements “to the letter. I even provided an addressed envelope for the ballot to be sent back to us so it would be absolutely perfect, as it would have to have been for the India postal service.”
Still, no ballots came. The Board of Elections in Manhattan — its funding cut this year in a dispute with the mayor — has been laggard in sending out absentee ballots, officials say. Ms. Scott-Ker and her husband, a university instructor, knew nothing of that squabble.
“We realized we’re not going to get to vote, and we were all geared up to do this,” she said. “We thought, maybe a friend could get the ballots for us in Manhattan and have them couriered to India, and we could courier them back. There were so many ifs and buts. I didn’t want a bureaucratic process to get in the way of casting a ballot.”
Her determination is clear. Even so, was it really necessary to go to all that trouble to cast votes in New York State, where most polls give the Democratic ticket a lead of 30 percent or more?
“Then you’re relying on other people to do your job,” she said. “Apathy doesn’t work in a democracy.”
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