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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

I'm a US expat (live in the UK) who is thus still registered to vote in San Francisco. Do us expats a favor and post your endorsements at least 2 months early. Our postal ballots are sent early and most sites procrastinate on their voter guides. For instance I filled and mailed my ballot for the June 2022 elections on April 28th, and I wish SFGate had published their analysis of the primary race for Insurance Commissioner sooner, I would have voted against the incumbent.

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With universal vote by mail, expats now don't vote too much earlier than voters in the city. For the June 2022 election, voters in SF received their ballots on May 8. So I think you got yours one or two weeks before that?

The deadline for deciding who could appear on the ballot was yesterday, September 6th, for the November 8th election. So ballots should start getting printed today and mailed to expats some time in the next week. So I think you'll get your ballot mid-to-late September.

We're currently on track to publish the voter guide on October 1st, but I'll see if we can get it up any earlier!

Is this actually legal?

Yes, of course, if you register as an overseas voter. You get to keep voting in the last place you lived. I couldn’t transfer my vote to Texas where it would do more good, for instance.

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/military-and-overseas-voting

When my daughter turns 18 and if we haven’t returned to the US by then, she’ll also get to vote in her hometown of San Francisco.

This makes sense in the same vein that a 2 ASCII character maximum variable length to save space made sense in 1978.

I know a us citizen can always vote in a federal election. But generally you can't vote in a local election, unless you live there. I can't tell from the link you posted... But apparently California doesn't care. And some wonder why people question election results.

> you can request to receive your ballot and voting materials by email, fax, or mail, and vote for contests in all federal, state, and local elections held in the precinct where you last lived, or where your parent/legal guardian last lived if you have never lived in the U.S.

What part of that is unclear?

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