Cruising and Voting

[MarkN]

For the US crowd, I am helping a reporter who is working on an article on voting rights and issues for RV'ers and liveaboard cruisers, particularly those that do not have an actual land-based/physical residence. i was hoping to see if anyone had any thoughts or has run into any specific problems. We know that voting rights are established at the state and local levels (although all laws must be consistent with federal laws for federal elections as well as the US Constitution, etc.), but there are just a wide variety of key issues.

Any problems? Issues? Ideas?

Mark Nicholas
author of: The Essentials of Living Aboard a Boat

[hphoen]

I'm not entirely sure what your looking for, but here's my situation.

My wife and I are cruisers who decided to sell our home in the States and move to the Caribbean. We still have our boat, but our home here in Nevis is our only land-based domicile. We are US citizens, and used to live in Virginia.

We want to vote in the upcoming elections, so I downloaded Absentee Ballot application forms from the Federal Voting Assistance Program website, www fvap gov (Sailnet won't let me post the actual URL because I don't have 10 posts on the board yet).

The rule is, if you have moved out of the country, you can vote in location where you had your last permanent residence. PO Boxes don't count, it needs to be a street address.

I haven't mailed in the forms yet, and so don't know if we'll encounter any problems, but I'll let you know if we do.

[Freesail99]

You may want to look at the live abroard lists as I got at least 40 emails on this topic, yesterday.

[Chaunclm]

We travel a great deal and use an outfit called escapees. This is a group based in Livingston Texas that will take care of all of one's need even to renewing license tags and drivers licenses. Most all Escapees are registered to vote in Polk county, Texas where the club's headquarters is located as I understand these folks handle mail for over 17,000 travelers.

We have used them for the last three years and are very satisfied.

http://www.escapees.com/index2.asp

[speciald]

I use St. Brendan's Isle in Green Cove Springs in Florida for mail forwarding. I have had no problems with getting absentee ballots. Some states are considering on-line absentee voting for deployed soldiers, etc.