OVERSEAS AND ONLINE: USA PASSPORT RENEWAL & VOTING
As a US citizen, passports and voting rights are very important.ย Both can be kept up to date from afar…here’s how:
After a two month beta trial, The United States Department of State has recently announced that Americans can now renew their passports online.ย ย This is new and additional staff has been hired to process the online system.ย The two caveats are for using this service: You must be located in the United States and your passport may not be expired by over 5 years.ย As of now, it is unclear if this new avenue of renewal will speed up the process overall or not.ย We will have to wait and see.
Americans have elections coming up locally and nationally.ย Are you registered to vote?ย Do you know that US Citizens living abroad can register to vote from overseas?
There are several online resource to help US citizens understand how to register to vote and vote from wherever they are when the time comes.ย Some useful sites include:
- https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/welcome-overseas-vote-from-abroad
- here you can learn all about overseas voting, what it means and terminology.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/smarter-living/american-vote-from-abroad.html
- here you can learn how to register and vote overseas
- https://www.fvap.gov/citizen-voter
- here you can register to vote from overseas and directly link to your state site with your registration and state specific options
- https://www.votefromabroad.org/
- Here you can also register or see a very clear state by state graphic of state voting acceptance procedure.
