Students face challenges with absentee voting for elections abroad

Karishma Lall, an exchange student from the U.K., had been waiting for years to vote in the U.K. parliamentary election for the first time Thursday, but her postal vote didn’t arrive in the U.S. on time.

For many international and exchange students at UCLA, elections in their countries pose challenges, and they may be unable to vote because of national laws or difficulty obtaining postal votes when they are allowed to do so.

“It’s the first election I can vote in, so it’s annoying that it didn’t work out,” said Lall, a third-year economics student.

The U.K. allows absentee voting, which lets those who are unwilling or unable to go to a polling station to casts their votes.

About 2.5 percent of the 4.6 million U.K. citizens living outside the country applied for absentee voting during the U.K parliamentary election this month, according to The Guardian. In order to receive a postal vote, U.K. citizens had to fill out an application form and return it to the U.K Electoral Commission 11 business days before the election. Many people took to social media to complain about postal vote delays that stopped them from participating in the election.

All voting forms had to be returned to the U.K. Electoral Commission by 10 p.m. local time on Thursday to be counted.

Third-year economics student Tristan Al-Shehab, who is also an exchange student from the U.K., said he did not try to obtain a postal vote.

“Being here, there’s a slight disconnect,” Al-Shehab said. “I was more neutral about the elections and didn’t feel as informed or interested in voting (as I would have in the U.K.).”

Jennifer Pinches, a second-year psychology student from the U.K. and a member of the UCLA gymnastics team, voted in the U.K election using a postal vote. She said she did not feel like she was missing out on much because she kept up with the news during the election season.

India ruled in January to allow absentee voting, according to the International Business Times. People who lived outside the country during the 2014 general election could not vote.

Second-year astrophysics student Zoya Chhabra said that although she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to vote and wasn’t in favor of any of the parties, she still felt she was missing out during election season.

“My family is very passionate about politics,” Chhabra said. “Election time is usually very eventful in India, with holidays and things like that, so it was difficult to not be in the middle of that.”

While Lall was eager to vote despite having lived outside the U.K. for the past nine months, she said she does not believe that people who are outside the country for very long should vote because she thinks they do not know enough about issues affecting people living in Britain to make good judgments during elections.

Pinches, however, said she thinks living outside the U.K. should not stop people from voting.

“I think you should definitely have a say in your own country even if you aren’t there,” she said. “You’re still affected by decisions made, especially if you have family living there.”

Some students noted differences between American attitudes surrounding elections and those they had witnessed in their home countries.

Lall said she thinks people in the U.S. are less flexible in deciding which party to vote for.

“I think people in the U.K. are less set in stone about the way they vote,” Lall said. “In the U.K., people tend to switch between parties, but in America, Democrats tend to always vote for Democrats.”

Chhabra said that the main difference she had noted was what she called apathy in the U.S. during elections. She said she felt Americans care less about elections because they have had the right to vote for much longer than people in India, which only became an independent country 68 years ago.

“People in my grandparents’ generation fought for the right to vote, so people in my generation still take it very seriously,” Chhabra said. “Here, people have had the right to vote for so long that they might not realize how important it is anymore.”