I Need One of Those DC License Plates...

So, this year I was excited. This year was different. I was 20 years old and there was an election that not only was I old enough to vote in, I was also interested in who won. I was pretty proud of myself. I stayed up to date on campaigns, even the primaries, watched the news, read articles online and after the DNC I was ready and raring to vote.

A few months before the election I went online to order my very first absentee ballot, I clicked on “Register to Vote” and the very first question I was faced with was one I couldn't answer: “Select State: Pick the state in which you last lived before moving outside the U.S. from the map below”. There was no “None” or “N/A” option, unsurprisingly Canada was not on said map, and you could not move on without selecting a state.

Well, I thought, I must have chosen the wrong option earlier on. So I went back and tried it again, sure enough I came up against the “Select State” road block. Sure that it must be a mistake on my part I perused the website hoping for answers, but the only one I was able to come up with was wholly unsatisfactory.

I am a US citizen. I have a passport. I have a social security number. I have an entire extended family living throughout the states. I am expected to pay taxes when my income is high enough. But I've never lived in the United States. My parents were both born in Pennsylvania and moved up to Canada after they were married, where they had two (delightful) children, my brother and me. Thus, without being asked and with no say in the matter I was automatically a dual Canadian-American citizen.

Now I can't say the whole thing hasn't been without its perks. I can travel into the US without hassle, I can pretend to be offended when people make dumb American jokes thinking they're in an all Canadian environment, and when traveling to other countries I can chose which flag I pin to my bag (yeah, it's always Canadian, but at least I have the choice honestly). And, I thought, I can vote for the leaders of both countries which take my hard-earned tax dollars.

Turns out that's not so.

While trolling through the FAQ on the Federal Voting Assistance Program I found this little gem: “Some states allow children of U.S. citizens residing overseas who are U.S. citizens but who have never resided in the U.S., to claim one of their parent's legal state of residence as their own“ (emphasis my own).

Huh. Looks like now, instead of being considered just a U.S. citizen I am now considered one of the “children of U.S. citizens residing overseas who are U.S. citizens but who have never resided in the U.S”, quite a mouthful.

And for some reason, some states think this means I shouldn't have the same rights as other U.S. citizens, for example, the right to vote. Guess which state isn't on the list. That's right, my parents home state, good old Penn. So if your parents happened to have lived in one of the 16 states that allow all their passport wielding, tax-paying citizens the right to vote, then good for you. Otherwise you get to sit on the sidelines, like me, and be expected to help pay for the decisions made by a representative you didn't help elect.

Now you may say it doesn't really matter, absentee ballots rarely come it to play anyway, but that's not the point. The point is, I'm a U.S. citizen and the federal government says I have the right to vote, but then gives each state the right to tell me I can't register to vote. This qualifies my citizenship, it says that since I belong to no state I can't belong to the country. That I'm good enough to take money from, but not to chose who I'm giving it to and that is just plain wrong, taxation without representation, and I'd write to my congressman to complain, only I haven't got one.