THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
It’s been a colorful campaign season. We’ve heard terms like blue wave and red wall, a surge of support for Democratic candidates and a barrier of gerrymandered congressional districts designed to try and hold them back.
We’ve had a President of the United States who has campaigned vigorously in the last few weeks, with the lowest job approval rating of any leader of the executive branch, urging voters to pretend that he’s the one on the ballot, and instead of making his case that he and his party are working to bring down soaring gas prices, he’s talking about the derrière of his Senate candidates.
We’ve heard about the “purpling” of places that no one imagined would be anything but deep red – Kansas and Texas and South Carolina – where President Trump’s hand picked candidates are in very tight races instead of galloping away.
But perhaps the best image of the entire campaign season is that of Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, a Catholic boy from Chicago, filling out and mailing his postal ballot to the Cook County clerk. It’s a particularly vivid and memorable picture because hardly a day has gone by that President Trump hasn’t denigrated America’s electoral system, literally. The New York Times published a record of each day the president attacked the integrity of US elections in his statements and showed that since his inauguration in January 2025, 70% of his 460 days in office included verbal attacks on our system. He started on the very first day, claiming again without any evidence, that the 2020 election was “rigged” and he has kept it up relentlessly, making false claims, particularly attacking postal ballots. “Anytime you have mail-in voting you have corrupt elections,” he said in September.
It’s clear that all those attacks on the system from President Trump are an attempt to sow doubt and then call into question any results he doesn’t like, then try to draw out the process and slow down the transition of power. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t call the Office of the President the bully pulpit for nothing. But the facts are against the President. His lawyers filed more than 60 lawsuits in 2020 claiming fraud in the voting system. He didn’t provide any evidence and he didn’t win any of those suits.
For Americans living overseas during this election, whether they are students or artists or executives or researchers or retirees, Pope Leo’s act of civic engagement as a US citizen living in Italy was an inspiration and a vote of faith in our electoral system.
Any American living overseas can use the nonpartisan website www.votefromabroad.org, which has been around for 20 years, to get their ballot and, through email or Zoom, ask any questions about the process if there’s any confusion. Book mark that site for the next election in 2028.