Voting from China, October 23 and October 31

October 23 and 30

When I agreed to take a trip to Guizhou with my friend Wanda, I had forgotten that I still had to figure out how to vote from abroad. Mark and I had ordered absentee ballots last August, but they still hadn't arrived.

On October 21, we received an email that the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu would provide free Fed-Ex mailing of ballots which were turned in by October 29. However, we would be gone from October 23-30, so I had to resolve the voting issue before we went. I went to the website for overseas voters, which had an emergency ballot to download, but the download was blocked. The consulate was closed on Wednesday (Oct. 22), so I started to panic. Would a ballot mailed on October 30 arrive on time?

The night before I left, it dawned on me that the reason the absentee ballot had been blocked was that although it was Tuesday in China, it was still over two weeks before the election in the U.S. When I got up early and tried downloading the ballot that morning, it worked! However, we still don't have our 110-Volt printer hooked up yet, so I would have to go to the office with Mark to print it out.

I walked the 10 minute walk with Mark - it was one of our first cool mornings, and the exercise felt good. We printed out the ballots - they are designed for 8 1/2 by 11 paper, and the office uses A4, which is slightly longer and narrower, but it fit. However, there were no blank envelopes to be had at the office, so I walked back to the apartment to get some. By this time Chao was here, so I had a ride back, along with my luggage. Mark and I got our ballots filled out, sealed, and witnessed, and I had the right address for our Registrar of Voters, but I was running out of time. I had to leave Mark to figure out how to get the ballots to the American consulate.

By the time I arrived back in Chengdu on October 30, our emergency ballots had already arrived in Louisiana. Meanwhile, our regular ballots had arrived the day before, and the website instructed us to send those as well. So Mark and I filled them out, then took them to the office to find two witnesses for sealing them. Since the deadline for sending them free through the Consulate had passed, I needed to send them myself through Fed Ex. Fortunately I ran into my friend Pat, on a similar mission, who told me that the Fed Ex. address on the website was wrong, and she had her driver tell my driver where the new one was located - about a 40 minute drive away.

In all, it took about 3 hours and 229 yuan ($35) to send the official ballots, which may not make it back in time, but it felt like the right thing to do. (Who knows, it may make it easier to get an absentee ballot for the next election.) ALong with the sealed envelopes, I included a short note that we weren't trying to vote twice; we were just trying to follow instructions. I'm hoping that exactly one set of our votes will count.