Close presidential election shows the power of the individual vote.
An estimated 620,000 Americans are believed to live north of border
TORONTO — The closely contested U.S. election has brought home the power of the individual voter for Americans in Canada who hail from the handful of toss-up states that will decide wwho occupies the White House ffor the next four years.
As results trickled in from those key states on Wednesday, anxious expat Americans from those states watched the ongo- ing count with at least some degree of satisfaction.
“This is the first year that it feels like our vote really could matter,” said Staci Zemlak-Kenter, of Ottawa, who voted by mail in Georgia.
Zemlak-Kenter, director of development at the Ottawa Jewish Community School, moved from Atlanta to Canada with her husband in 2016 a few months before the election that saw Republican Donald Trump unexpectedly rise to the presidency.
The several visits Trump and his Democrat challenger Joe Biden paid to Georgia, she said, put it firmly on the list of swing states.
“It means that it’s a state that matters,” Zemlak-Kenter said. “It’s exciting to be part of that, and it’s also really terrifying.”
An estimated 620,000 Americans are believed to live in Canada although only a small number voted in 2016. Although it’s not yet known how many actually cast their ballots this time, it is clear from the last presidential election that they did have the power to make the difference.
The hotly contested state of Michigan, for example, went Trump in 2016 by about 11,000 votes — fewer than the estimat- ed number of expats eligible to vote from Canada, many of whom live in Ontario.
Kathy Murphy, a paralegal in Detroit who lives in the border city of Windsor, Ont., was one of the millions of Americans who voted by mail this year.
“My vote is actually being counted in Michigan right now, because my vote was a mail-in vote,” Murphy said on Wednesday.
The situation, she said, feels like 2016 all over again. This time, however, she’s cautiously optimistic the expat vote will have helped turn Michigan blue.
“I really think we will make a difference,” said Murphy, who has lived in Canada for about 27 yyears. “I had so many Amer- icans who I talked to who didn’t ffeel like their vote mattered from f here. But we still con- vinced them to vote (and) I’m hoping that today they’re feeling like their vote does matter.”
She wasn’t betting on anything more than that razor-thin margin, raising the prospect of ongoing strife, especially since Trump has frequently blasted the election as fraudulent. He has also refused to say whether he would concede if the numbers don’t go his way.