OPINION: The Importance of Americans in Greece
By Stacey Harris-Papaioannou
This is the English translation of the op-ed published in Greek in the newspaper of record, To Vima, on Sunday, June 9, 2024, placed along side two major articles on the US elections by Vima journalists.
This year’s US presidential elections present a stark choice. Will America remain a beacon of democracy, individual rights, the rule of law and the anchor of the Western Alliance? Or will America shred its Constitution and become another racist, ignorant autocracy?
Though the whole world’s future is at stake, only American citizens have the right to select America's next president and congress. Those citizens include millions of American voters living abroad, among them the tens of thousands of U.S. passport holders living here in Greece.
How? Since the 1970s – as Greece is implementing this year – the US allows for mail-in ballots. Even citizens who have lived outside America for decades, or have neglected to file income tax returns, can mail in their ballot for president and members of Congress.
According to the US State Department, there are close to 7 million Americans of voting age who live abroad. That is roughly equivalent to the number of registered voters in a mid-sized state and more than enough to sway a presidential election.
Consider this: in 2020, the US Presidential election was won by just a few thousand votes that came from absentee ballots. Democratic voters abroad put the Biden/Harris team over the top in at least two key swing states. Overseas vote tallies in Arizona (18,435) and Georgia (18,475) exceeded President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in those states (10,457 and 11,779 respectively), with the strong majority of those votes estimated to be Democratic.
In other words, Americans living outside US borders brought in the victory for Joe Biden and can this year too, if they participate in the elections.
Martha McDevitt-Pugh, International Chair of Democrats Abroad, recently pointed out: “In 2022, Democrats needed five more seats to control the House of Representatives but lost six races by less than 1%. These, and many other races, can be won in 2024 with the overseas vote.”
The U.S. Embassy in Athens refers to "tens of thousands" of Americans in Greece, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to above 100,000. We are, in other words, a big enough community for our votes to matter. But few of us spend the ten minutes online to request our ballot be sent to us by email, and fewer download, fill out, print, and mail those ballots to our home state.
Unfortunately, globally, just 7.8% of American voters living abroad voted in 2020. If that participation rate were increased by only a few percentage points, it would have a decisive role in the results.
Americans living in Greece − the birthplace of democracy – hold in their hands the power to determine the future course of America’s democracy. Our voting – or not voting – will matter a great deal to Greece and to the world.
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*Stacey Harris-Papaioannou is the 2023 Democrats Abroad Greece Fundraising Chair. She previously served as the 2019 − 2023 Greece Country Committee Chair, and also as the 2019 Vice Chair.