VOTING WITHOUT RESIDENCE: THE UNITED STATES’ UNSEEN ELECTORATE

How 38 states let citizens who’ve never lived in the U.S. vote — creating phantom constituents with real influence and raising urgent questions about representation, residency, and election integrity

Every election season, debates over ballots, drop boxes, voter ID, and polling hours dominate the headlines. But beneath the surface of every headline lies a quietly consequential policy choice that almost nobody talks about: the right of U.S. citizens who have never lived in the United States to vote in federal elections in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

This isn’t about Americans temporarily abroad for work or military service. This is about people born overseas, raised overseas, educated overseas — and in some cases, never once having set foot on U.S. soil — yet still casting ballots in U.S. elections based on their parent’s last U.S. address. It is a phenomenon few voters in the states that allow it even know exists, but the implications are deep and structural.

The legal foundation for this right stems from the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), passed in 1986 to ensure that Americans serving overseas could still participate in federal elections. Over years of implementation and state-level interpretation, a critical distinction emerged: some states allow “never-resided” citizens — those who inherit citizenship from a U.S. parent but have never established residence under any state’s laws — to register and vote absentee in federal contests based on a parent’s last U.S. address. Dozens of states have embraced this expanded definition, and the result is a class of voters who may have never lived under the laws they help shape.

Across the country, election law experts estimate that 38 states plus the District of Columbia now permit such voting for federal offices. In these jurisdictions, a ballot can be generated with nothing more than proof of citizenship and an inherited address. Twelve states explicitly do not grant that right, effectively disenfranchising never-resided citizens entirely.

At first blush, this looks like an inclusive expansion of the franchise — particularly for families with deep ties to the U.S. and complex diasporas. But in practice, it decouples political representation from residency in ways that were not part of the Founders’ design. The principle of consent of the governed assumes that those who vote live under the laws enacted by the officials they elect. If you have never lived under those laws, paid those taxes, or experienced those civic obligations firsthand, what does it mean to help choose who enforces and interprets them?

The distribution of these voters is also uneven. Not all states treat overseas never-resided citizens the same, and not all states count them in the same way. Some allow them only for federal offices (President, Senate, House), while others allow their participation in full ballots. Moreover, the public has very little data on the numbers involved — the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s own 2017 brief estimated just under twelve thousand never-resided voters in 2016, but that was a snapshot limited to certain jurisdictions. With so many states now on board, the total number could be significantly higher today.

Even without reliable statewide totals, the structural issue is clear: you can influence or decide the outcome of elections in a state you have never lived in, may never live in, and whose community you have never experienced. That represents a conceptual departure from the classic U.S. model of “one person, one residence, one stake.”

This policy also intersects uneasily with broader election vulnerabilities. Identity verification of overseas voters relies heavily on documentation that can be difficult to validate: consular birth reports, passports, or federal records. In domestic elections, local boards have mechanisms to verify residency and identity; abroad, those checks are thinner and more deferential, often limited to paperwork review and attestation. This opens a wider surface for identity compromise and procedural confusion.

The structural incentives are likewise uneven. Political parties with strong interest in broad turnout will naturally support expanded overseas voting categories. States reluctant to restrict the franchise default to permissiveness rather than restraint, especially when the narrative is “protect Americans abroad.” But without deliberate guardrails, ease of voting becomes detachment from accountability.

A serious reform effort would start with two fundamentals: first, reaffirming that representation is supposed to follow residence and risk, not just citizenship; and second, creating transparent data reporting on who these overseas, never-resided voters are, where they are counted, and how many ballots they cast — information that is currently diffuse and poorly tracked.

If America believes in meaningful political representation, then those who vote in a state’s elections should logically be individuals who have lived under its laws, paid its costs, and borne its consequences. Expanding the franchise is a noble goal, but expanding it in ways that detach voters from lived state experience demands a rigorous public conversation — one that has not yet happened.

For a system so obsessed with election integrity and turnout metrics, this silent category of voters raises important questions: Who are we designing our electoral system to serve? And who actually governs when the governed are nowhere to be found?

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