Day 3: Ohio is recruiting foreigners to vote

As I've written about before, I am no longer an American...I renounced citizenship in 2018. Five years later and the State of Ohio hasn't gotten the memo and is still trying to recruit me to vote.

For those of you that aren't aware, in Ohio, the process of voting absentee involves asking a county agency (there are many counties in Ohio) for a piece of paper and mailing it back from your overseas home. They'll send you a ballot wherever you want in the world and there's no real way that I could ever figure out that they can tell if the person requesting the ballot is eligible to vote. If you can't be bothered to ask for a ballot, you can also just print your own and send it in. All you need is the name, birthday and address of a voter...all of which is public information. What always confused me was that the deadline for sending the ballot back was such that there was no way it could arrive in time to actually be counted.

This all seemed normal to me for years until I started voting as an overseas Italian and in Hong Kong elections. Italy sends overseas Italians ballots automatically, but only after you've registered with your passport and proof of actually living in the place you're registering...in our case, they want your Hong Kong ID card and address proof. And they send the ballot via a trackable courier. The completed ballot needs to be sent back to the consulate well in advance of the actual election to be counted.

Hong Kong, like many places, doesn't let people even vote overseas because this would affect the integrity of the process. It's hard to have observers observe a process if they can't be there. Instead, voting takes place in person on paper that goes into a box. The boxes are taken to one building where civil servants are tasked with counting them in front of media and cameras. They count them all the same day.

The reason I bring all this up is that there seems to be some sort of drama going on in the USA where the current ruling party is using the criminal justice system to attack the losing party from the previous election for questioning the integrity of the election process. Now I'm not saying that the US election system has a problem with integrity or that the election was stolen, but if they can't even figure out that I'm not a citizen anymore, does anyone have any idea who is voting?