Could battleground states be decided from … Canada? - POLITICO10/20/23

In their post-diplomatic life, Heyman and his wife set out to figure out why that happened. What they found stuck with them:some 9 million Americans lived abroad pre-pandemic according to the State Department, but only about eight percent of them voted.

It turned out they didn’t know how to vote, or even if they were still eligible.

The pair approached the Biden team in 2020 pitching to champion the American voter abroad effort — a simple website financed by the Democrats, designed to be a non-partisan tool to help Americans overseas figure out how to cast their ballots.

Even though fewer Americans lived abroad during the pandemic, the expat vote total went up by 73 percent from 2016 to 2020, reaching close to 900,000 votes, Heyman boasts.

He’s convinced overseas voters played a key role in helping snatch battleground states. He points to that critical Georgia race in 2020, when 18,000 votes came in from overseas to Georgia, a state where President Joe Biden cleared by 11,779 but Trumpattempted to overturn.

Some 44,000 votes across Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin prevented a tie in the Electoral College.

Hopes, questions and guesstimates

But could votes from Canada really swing the election?

Richard Johnston, a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, says the Democrats have the right idea.

“There’s sparse evidence on this,” said Johnston, but “there’s every reason to believe expats are disproportionately Democrat,” and the “closer the race is, the more consequential any group, even small groups can be.”

“It’s not at all implausible” that votes from Canada could swing the presidential race, Johnston said, but there “are a lot of contingencies.”

“Are they indeed as one-sided [pro-Democrat] as we suspect? What’s the turnout rate actually going to be? What’s the geography of the states of last residence? If it’s a random draw according to the size of the states, that means there’s a lot of people from New York or California — they’re not going to make a big difference at all.”

Maybe not in the presidential race, but Heyman points out the House races there will also matter.

“These are best guesstimates, as opposed to some deep analysis [from an] exact number, right? So, this is the play,” Heyman said.

“We’re talking about small numbers of total votes that will be at the margin, that America is a divided country, andthe wisdom of both parties right now is it’s going to be very, very close — that they’re going to battle out for the marginal voter.”

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