It is time to vote! But how?

As we are just about a week away from Election Day in the United States, I figured it was worth talking about how we do that as full-time travelers. In short, we opt to vote by mail.

We are residents of Florida and request to vote by mail. Our county even offers an online tracker to show when your ballot was mailed, when they receive it back, and when it has been counted. We have used St. Brennan's Isle mail forwarding service since 2019. They offer different levels of service, but we opt to have the front of our mail scanned. From there, we can choose to have the contents scanned, have the item mailed, or shred the item. This honestly makes voting (and filing taxes) from anywhere fairly easy. 

As soon as we saw our ballots in our inbox, we requested a shipment to Peru (also helps to be "stable" in a location during the month of October to make this easier). We had time so we used USPS Priority International mail to send our ballots (SBI lets you choose your shipping method). This cost us $38.85 and took about two and a half weeks to arrive.

We retrieved our mail on October 25th, completed our votes, and sent them out via DHL Express on October 26th for $52.75 (DHL was having a 30% off sale so we scored there!). Our ballots were delivered to the county office in Florida on November 1st, with a whole week to spare. Now we will track to see when the county logs them as "received" and "counted."

Is it worth our monthly mail forwarding service fees and an additional $91.60 to vote? Absolutely. It's a right that many fought for and though we are away from our home country for long stretches at a time, it's still very important to us to vote in our local elections. We really hope that other full-time travelers make it a priority, too.

UPDATE: As of November 3rd, our votes have been counted! Love that we can track this info so easily through our county.

~Jo, Nomadic Momma