Last week, I sat on a couch with a view of the crenellations and spires of All Souls College, Oxford, and filled out an absentee ballot voting for Kamala Harris.
Because I’m registered to vote in Massachusetts, and because I live in a very small town where I know the town clerk by her first name, it was an easy thing to do. That’s not true everywhere. In some states in the US, casting a ballot has become an extreme sport, with queues hours long and laws making it a crime to give water to someone waiting or to save their place if they need to go to the loo. Australia’s sausage sizzles at polling places would probably be a felony, and being able to vote at the local surf club in a wet bathing suit on a weekend beach day is unimaginable in a country that statutorily mandates elections on a Tuesday.
Geraldine Brooks is a dual US-Australian citizen and has voted in the US election but, as she is not in a swing state, her vote “won’t count, not really”.Credit: Illustration by Michael Howard
All I’d had to do was stop by the town hall the week before I flew to England and apply for the ballot. As soon as it was available, the town clerk emailed it to me, and when I sent it back without the required cover sheet, she immediately informed me so that I could fix my error and ensure my vote would count.
But it won’t count, not really, and that’s also because I live in Massachusetts. It’s not a swing state; it’s solidly Democratic. (And I do mean solidly. In the 1972 presidential election, it was the only state in the nation that didn’t go to Nixon.)
Only seven states count in this race. The other 43 are either solidly Democratic, like Massachusetts, or solidly Republican, like most of the states in the US South. Without going into the ridiculous arcana of the electoral college system, in which a candidate can get millions more actual votes nationally and still lose the election, Harris is virtually assured of 226 electoral college votes, while Trump has equal certainty of 219. Just 93 votes are up for grabs in the seven swing states. It means that in a population of 330 million, the election will hinge on the decision of only tens of thousands.
As unjust as that is, as a born-and-raised Australian sitting here in Oxford, an even graver injustice is starkly evident. As a dual citizen, at least I got to cast a ballot and record my choice in the overall national vote count. But the whole world will be affected by whom the residents of those mere seven swing states choose as president. Those who are most at risk don’t get any choice at all.
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If it is Donald Trump, he will once again opt out of climate agreements, condemning millions to a future even more catastrophic than what so many are already experiencing. He’ll further incentivise fossil fuel companies already gushing with both record production and record profits. He’ll abandon Ukraine, putting Putin on the border of Poland. Instead of calling for a ceasefire or restraint, he’ll further enable Netanyahu’s murderous rampages and escalation.
He will eviscerate America’s professional civil service, sacking experts who have dedicated their lives to big problems like nuclear security, extreme weather prediction, aircraft safety and other challenges that often only the US has had the resources and the will to tackle. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, plan to fire these experts and replace them with partisan hacks whose only goal will be to gut regulation and make life easier for their billionaire buddies in fossil fuel, real estate and crypto.