American flies 17,000 km home from Singapore to vote in presidential election
Eric Smith outside a polling station in Jefferson County, Louisville, Kentucky, shortly before he voted. (Photo: Eric Smith)
Thirty hours, 16,877 km, a minor bureaucratic snafu and a short queue later, Eric Smith finally got to vote in the 2016 United States presidential election on Tuesday (8 November) local time, having flown all the way home from Singapore specially to vote.
“I see it as my civic duty and my patriotic duty, and it’s not something that everyone gets to do. So if you have the right to vote, you should exercise it,” said the 42-year-old teacher, who has been based in the Republic for the past six years. His hometown is in Jefferson County in Louisville, Kentucky.
Smith, who is home for just a day before flying back to Singapore, was in time to cast his vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Smith’s odyssey started two weeks ago when he realised that he had not received his absentee ballot, despite requesting it ahead of time. This resulted in him missing the deadline to mail his ballot home. So Smith got online to research the quickest, cheapest way to get back to the States.
The result: more than a day of flying from Singapore to Tokyo to Dallas and finally Louisville, a journey that started on Monday morning and cost him US$1,054 (S$1,463).
But that was not the end of it. When Smith got to his assigned polling station in an elementary school gymnasium at 9am, he was told to go to the county voting headquarters as he was marked as an absentee voter.
He then had his case heard before a board of bipartisan election officials tasked to review anomalous cases in order to prevent voter fraud.
After a wait of 30 minutes, Smith was allowed to vote. “The election officials were so impressed. They voted unanimously to let me vote and then all thanked me for traveling,” he said.
So Smith and his family drove back to the elementary school, where he queued for another half hour and finally got to cast his vote. And even though Kentucky was ultimately won by Republican candidate Donald Trump, Smith said, “The process was reassuring. I loved the act of voting.”
Going to the ballot box
Asked why he had gone to all that trouble despite Kentucky being a traditionally Republican state, Smith told Yahoo Singapore, “Because I think this election is so scary and important, and the stakes are really high, so I wanted to make sure that I’ve done my part.”
Last year, he was also inspired by the example of Burmese people in Singapore, whom he observed queuing in the heat outside their embassy to vote in their country’s general election. “That was really impressive, because they don’t know if their vote is going to count or not, but they still did it. It really got to me, because voting is about what you want, and your hopes,” he said.
Smith, who previously taught in South Korea and China, was also energised by the thousands of messages he received via Pantsuit Nation. He had posted his travel plans on the Facebook group, which has some two million Clinton supporters. “I was going alone and felt like it was a silly adventure, but when I had Wi Fi on the plane, it really blew up. For hours, I would read messages and chat with people who were excited. It gave me energy,” he added.
But it was not just fellow Americans urging him on. Smith’s Singaporean and fellow expatriates back in the Republic, who have been “horrified” by the election campaign also encouraged him.
“I feel like I get to vote for them, because the consequences also affect everybody else,” he said.
