Monday, September 23rd - Day 13 The Challenges of Voting While Abroad - A digression!
The Context
One of the challenges we encountered with this trip concerns the US election that will be held on November 8th - when we will be on the other side of the world in New Zealand. The race is incredibly close and the electorate incredibly polarized between Republican candidate Donald Trump, who is running in his third Presidential election, and Kamilla Harris, the Democrat who served as Vice-President to Joe Biden for the past four years. Harris was catapulted into the race for the Presidency when Joe Biden's performance in a debate with Donald Trump, held in June, led many of his supporters to believe that he no longer was viable as a candidate, and no longer in possession of the stamina and energy to successfully serve another term in the office. So, before leaving, we contacted the Erie County Board of Elections and they arranged to email us ballots when they became available - we would need to print them off and send them back in envelopes that they would provide. These materials arrived last week in a Zipped file for each of us.
Getting our US ballots ready
Following our visit to the castle and garden in Eze on Sunday, September 22nd, we stopped by the local tourist information office to get a map and information on the area. We asked about where we might get our US election ballot materials printed off. The friendly person working the desk offered to print them right there but we couldn't access the files, which we'd downloaded to our laptops, from our phones. So we resolved to return to the village and get those files emailed to ourselves (they had arrived from the BOE in a zipped format) and return to have them printed before the office closed at 5pm. So we had a nice lunch on the terrace at 'home' and then returned to the tourism office, leaving with our ballots and the two envelopes (each) that we need to return the completed ballots in. That was a great relief to have done. We don't want to miss an opportunity to vote against the conman buffoon Donald Trump, and to support what we genuinely hope will be America's first woman - and a mixed race woman at that! - President. We picked up a couple grocery items and a roll of scotch tape to help assemble the ballot return envelopes.
We spent Monday morning meticulously following the instructions from the BOE. We filled out our ballots and placed them in the printed envelopes that we had carefully assembled. Sealed with the tape we bought, they were ready for the post office! Unfortunately, we hadn't realized that Monday was a holiday of some sort in France (or at least in this area!) and the post office wasn't open. We walked out of Eze to take pictures both ways - one of the village on the cliffs, and the other of the bridge and surroundings.
Finally, a few days later, we went to a post office in Menton and mailed our ballots.
