Donald Trump’s trade war with China has already victimized many American farmers and businesses, but a new group of citizens could soon pay an unexpected price: Voters who cast ballots from overseas—including members of the military—may have to pay $60 or more to send their ballots back to the U.S. in order to be counted.
What does overseas voting have to do with trade policy? As Bill Theobald at The Fulcrum explains, the Trump administration is seeking to punish China by withdrawing from the 192-member Universal Postal Union, which for a century and a half has set international postal rates. The UPU allows China to ship packages to the U.S. at a discounted rate, a policy designed to help developing countries that Trump wants to see changed.
To get its way, the administration has placed the U.S. on track to leave the UPU in October, just a month before critical elections in many states. If that withdrawal comes to pass, normal mail service could be disrupted for Americans living abroad. As Tierney Sneed noted in a detailed analysis in June, such voters already “face tight—and sometimes impossible—turnaround times between when they receive ballots and when they must be send them out to meet their state’s absentee voting deadlines.”
Shipping services like FedEx or UPS offer the only alternative, but they’re prohibitively expensive. According to Jared Dearing, the executive director of Kentucky’s Board of Elections, it could cost “upward of $60” just to send in a ballot, prices that would be paid by both civilians and service members living overseas.
Making matters worse, Sneed now reports that many election officials are preparing to send out absentee ballots just before the UPU meets in late September to discuss Trump’s demands. These administrators therefore don’t know whether “to tell overseas voters to proceed as usual or to expect new issues” in terms of the cost and time it will take to send back ballots.
Turnout is already quite low among Americans abroad: A study published last year by the Federal Voting Assistance Program found that just 7% of voting-age civiliansparticipated in the 2016 elections. The expense and uncertainty surrounding Trump’s conflict with the UPU are only likely to send those numbers even lower.
And while overseas voters may appear to be unintentional victims rather than deliberate targets of Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to negotiations with foreign nations, Democrats are likely to suffer more. According to voting expert Michael McDonald, “overseas civilian voters are some of the strongest Democratic constituencies, and they well outnumber overseas military voters.” That fact can only make it more likely that Trump proceeds on his current course.