American in Halifax casting absentee ballot against Trump
A Halifax woman says the moment Donald Trump become an official presidential candidate, she knew she had to cast her ballot across the border.
As a dual Canadian-American citizen, Bethany Isaksen has been living in Halifax for the past couple of years after she came from Maine to take nursing at St. Francis-Xavier University.
Watching the presidential race from afar, Isaksen said the whole experience has been “really frustrating.”
“Mostly obviously because of Donald Trump. Like when he first started and put his name out there I was like ‘yeah yeah, OK, this is never going to happen,’” Isaksen said.
“It’s unbelievable and a little disappointing … that he has gotten this far.”
With her mother and one sister still in the U.S., Isaksen said whatever happens in the election still hits very close to home, and she would never move back to America under a Trump presidency.
Isaksen said she wasn’t necessarily surprised when Trump began gaining some public support, but had hoped the system and other Republicans would have stopped his bid to become president before it reached this point.
This will be the first American election Isaksen has voted in, and she’s in a unique position to compare that ongoing race with our recent Canadian federal election where she also cast her ballot.
For one, Isaksen said she couldn’t believe “how short” the Canadian election was here, versus the months and months of campaigning and preliminaries in the United States.
“This is so nice, this is how it should be. You’re not given all this time to drag people through the mud,” Isaksen said.
Although Isaksen said she was hoping to use her absentee ballot to vote for Bernie Sanders, once the race narrowed to Hillary Clinton and Trump, she decided it was vital to vote at all costs against the business mogul’s “reality show” campaign.
Although there’s still “a little fear” Trump will gather enough votes from die-hard Republicans and right-wing citizens to win, Isaksen said she believes Clinton will come out on top and do a good job.
“He’s just not fit to be a president to run the country,” Isaksen said.
“I really think that the U.S. won’t let that happen. I do have faith in them still.”
U.S. Consulate sees ‘uptick’ in absentee voting enquiries
With the U.S. election a hot topic on both sides of the border, more Americans than usual are looking into how to vote from Nova Scotia.
Although they don’t have hard numbers on how many calls the U.S. Consulate-General has gotten recently, spokeswoman Marcia Seitz-Ehler said they know anecdotally they’ve “seen an uptick” in absentee voting questions.
“We could certainly say there’s been interest in this election,” Seitz-Ehler said.
There are more than 8,000 American immigrants living in the province, about 17 per cent of the 48,275 total, but SeitzEhler said they’re not sure how many will be voting since absentee residents register with individual states.
For those unsure of how to go about sending in an absentee ballot, Seitz-Ehler said the www.fvap.gov website is a great resource that takes Americans through the steps of filling out a form, printing and signing off on your ballot and mailing it in.