What’s with my provocative title? Remember a while back when I posted this entry about a group called Democrats Abroad trying to register expats in India so that they could vote absentee in the U.S. election? Well its not just India. Several articles recently have followed this phenomena. I covered this on my own blog a few weeks ago but the issue keeps surfacing in the media so I thought I would bring it to the attention of SM readers. Here is an excerpt from Newsweek:

With polls projecting a tight race, Americans abroad know just how much their votes could count. A recent tally of two Democratic Web sites, OverseasVote2004.com and OverseasVote.com, shows that 75 percent of the total number of voters has registered in the last 10 weeks, and more than 40 percent of those voters are from swing states. Although they did not give the exact figures, Republican organizers outside the U.S. claim the number of voters signing on with Republicans Abroad in Europe has skyrocketed 400 percent since 2000. The number of chapters of Democrats Abroad has risen from 33 to 70 since the beginning of this year. “Based on our figures, 5.3 percent of overseas voters are from Florida [and] 4.4 percent from Pennsylvania. Washington, Michigan and Ohio all tie for about 3 percent,” says Americans Overseas for Kerry’s Jim Brenner, who is based in Boston. Ironically, the real battleground states of this election could end up being countries like Canada, France and Mexico.

Slate magazine however, recognized another angle to this new movement which is quite interesting:

While Americans who go abroad to kill people vote Republican, Americans who go abroad to do just about anything else vote Democratic. This is the logic behind the unprecedented effort to get out the vote among U.S. civilians overseas, and the reason that effort is overwhelmingly Democratic.

How have they formulated this dubious theory?

Americans with passports favor Kerry over Bush by 58 percent to 35 percent, according to a recent Zogby poll. That means anyone who has so much as spent a weekend in Cancún is probably a Democrat. As for the number of Americans who live overseas long-term and are eligible to vote, estimates vary wildly, but the New York Times put the figure at a conservative 4.4 million. Of those, about 500,000 are members of the military and their families. That group has typically voted Republican, with high turnout. The civilians abroad remain unsurveyed, but based on my own forays among Americans living in Canada and France, I’d say they swing heavily Democratic.

The little partisan angel on my shoulder wants me to say that this proves that Republicans don’t understand enough about the world to vote correctly (only concerning foreign policy issues) because they never leave their small towns and farms. If they did go abroad maybe they would learn things aren’t so black and white. On the other hand, the little devil on my shoulder…well actually I am sure SM readers will have their own theories to explain this passport phenomena. I for one tend not to heed the advice of angels or devils.