Israeli army soldiers stand near a sign signifying the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas.
At the time, the embassy noted how “many U.S. federal elections for the House of Representatives and Senate have been decided by a margin smaller than the number of ballots cast by absentee voters.”
The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem said all states are required to count every absentee ballot “that is valid and reaches local election officials by the absentee ballot receipt deadline.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told Fox News Digital that U.S. citizens living outside the United States can register to vote and vote absentee while living overseas. Students living overseas for an extended period during an election season need to vote absentee and complete a Federal Post Card Application at FVAP.gov to request an absentee ballot, the spokesperson said, adding that voting residency will continue to be the student’s last legal residence prior to leaving the U.S. to study abroad.
The State Department spokesperson said U.S. citizens voting from overseas should check FVAP.gov for their state’s deadlines and more information about how to return their ballot.
“An American living abroad can most easily request an absentee ballot either through the team that we have set up at our center in Jerusalem or, again, they could go to the U.S. embassy or consulate in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv,” Diament said. “And as long as you show your ID and you get your absentee ballot appropriately, then you just need to send it in a timely way. It’s really not that complicated.”
Absentee ballots are prepared for mailing at the Wake County Board of Elections in Raleigh, N.C., on Sept. 17, 2024. U.S. citizens voting from abroad are encouraged to request their ballots as soon as possible.
Jeremy Kazzaz, executive director of the Beacon Coalition, a nonprofit focused on getting out the Jewish vote locally on the ground in Pittsburgh, said U.S. citizens, whether traveling out of state or abroad during an election season, should send their absentee ballots as soon as possible to be included in initial counts.
“The mail system gets bogged down around election time because it’s not just all the ballots that are going through the mail, but it is the 5 billion pieces of political mail that everybody is getting on a day-to-day basis,” Kazzaz told Fox News Digital. “And then you add to that the chaos and disruptions of multiple hurricanes going through the Eastern Seaboard at this time. And so the best practice is to do all of this as early as humanly possible.”
While Diament said it is confidential which candidates who members of the Orthodox Union support, he pointed to polling done by Israeli outlets and pollsters on the ground among Israelis and Americans as signaling a shift toward Republican Donald Trump, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
“You know, frankly, that is not matched in the American Jewish population as a whole. The American Jewish population, by and large, is pretty liberal. And so, traditionally, the Democrat wins a majority, sometimes a very, very large majority. But we’ve done polling and others have done polling this year among American Jews here in the United States,” Diament said. “What we’ve seen, at least so far, is that while Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate is ahead among the American Jewish vote in general, she’s not ahead by as large a margin as the Democratic candidate, you know, has been traditionally.”
Diament argued that rising antisemitism in the U.S. could be one contributing factor.
“It’s a different kind of election in the wake of what’s going on over the past year for American Jews,” Diament said. “We’ve seen the terrible surge in antisemitism in the aftermath of the Oct. 7th terrorist attacks. And that’s another dimension, which American Jews have to really stand up and hold government officials accountable and make sure that they are being responsive to us, to make sure we’re guaranteed our rights of freedom of religion in this country.”
Regarding his son and his sons’ friends taking their gap year in Israel, Diament said that “in some ways, they feel more comfortable and secure than some of their friends who are on some American university campuses.”
“Their lives are not being threatened, obviously, the way people on the ground in Israel are by foreign militaries,” he said. “But there are a lot of campuses where young American Jews are really being … psychologically threatened and personally threatened.”
Original article source: Jewish-American group urges US citizens in Israel to vote as absentee ballots can impact swing states
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 02:00:00
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