I'm an American in the UK - it's bizarre I have to hunt down a fax machine to vote
Pub manager Seamus Phillips, who supports Kamala Harris, says he is anxious about the prospect of Donald Trump winning the US election on 5 November.
California voter and London resident Seamus Phillips, 46, is taking the US election extremely seriously. But all political issues aside, he has something immediate to confront: the basic difficulty of voting from abroad.
“It's still kind of an absolute hassle to vote, at least in my county,” says the pub manager and graphic designer. “Traditionally, I fill out the ballot from an email, then I have to print it out, sign it and fax it. I think I could potentially mail it, but I think last time maybe I had to fax it as well, because I left it a little late.
“I've been faxing these ballots for the last nine years, and I've basically gone from one place to the other to do it. Originally, there was a fancy coffee shop really close to my house that had a fax machine. Then they got rid of it, so I went to a cellphone repair shop in my neighbourhood that actually turned out to be lovely, but it was dingy on the surface. And then in the last election, they laughed me out of the shop because they’d gotten rid of it.
“So I ended up having to go to a newsagent in Holborn, and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, other Americans have sought us out because we have one of the only fax machines in the city.’
"It was such an antique. It looked like something actually out of the 1980s – they had to brush a layer of dust off and move a stack of magazines to get to it. And so now I'm sort of nervous. Will they even have a fax machine anymore? Like, will it have survived four years?”
Whether voting at home or abroad, Americans confronted with this presidential election are thinking forward four years in the most serious of terms — and looking back four at a time to an era when things felt very different.
“I lived in Ventura County in Southern California for 15 years,” Phillips says. “Ventura has always kind of been a little purplish part of a blue state, but still blue. I’m originally from central Massachusetts, and California overall felt edgier in terms of having a little bit more intense Christianity around me.
“I lived there in 2008 like when we were voting on gay marriage, via Proposition 8. That was so devastating, although we won with Barack Obama that year — I remember I just immediately drove to LA with friends, and we just were protesting in the street that night. You know, that was just a devastating loss or gay marriage that year.”
The shock passage of Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in California, paved the way for the nationwide legal battle that ended in 2015 when the US Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was a federal right.
As a California resident, Seamus has had more years of exposure to Kamala Harris than many Americans (she represented California in the Senate from 2017-2021, and was California attorney general from 2010-2016) – and his views of her have been shaped accordingly.
“I’ve always been a Kamala fan, but I think my feeling from the get-go was that I recognised she wasn't popular nationally," Phillips says.
"She wasn't overwhelmingly popular, and so I wasn't convinced that she could win this for us, because there's been so much negative press about her. There was some sort of toxic boss rumours going on about her, there was a lack of visibility – and as much as I like looked at her squarely and thought she'd be a great president. I really wasn't ready for her to be the candidate.
“But somehow within those days after Biden dropped out, the endorsements and the support started trickling in to the point where it was a done deal for her and there was no going back. And not only was I sort of seeing her freshly, but as she got out on the campaign trail, she brought with her a lot more life and vitality and joy. And I feel like we've gotten to see a really positive side of her, a deeper side of her.
“And adding Tim Walz to the ticket just absolutely energised and invigorated things. I’ve heard his version of manhood referred to as ‘tonic masculinity’, and that’s something I love.”
Like many Democratic voters, Seamus is deeply worried by the possibility of another Donald Trump presidency. But something that’s also been disturbing him for some time is how conspiratorial, black-and-white thinking has taken hold on the left as well.
“I’m surprised how many of these people who I get on famously, who in any other context I would see as perfectly liberal, also really embrace conspiracy theories,” he says.
“I definitely hear conspiracy theories about both Trump assassination attempts, that this is all sort of orchestrated somehow. They don't always have the answers, they just ‘know’ that it's not what we're seeing. They're quite convinced of it.”
On the other hand, as a pub manager, he knows that there are shades of opinion about US politics everywhere – and that as an American abroad during a particularly stormy time in his homeland’s political history, he isn’t always fully in control of how he’s perceived.
“Working in a pub, I get to talk to a lot of British people, and a lot of people from different backgrounds. And, quite frankly, there's been a mix of things. I’m a very blue guy, but I also recognise that I'm a guy with a loud voice and a strong personality. And I think there's been a period of time in the post-Trump era that sometimes I find that people conflate me with Trump. Or maybe that's just my insecurity and my self-consciousness.”
Seamus says he is deeply worried about how Trump's increasingly dark and authoritarian rhetoric might be turned into action. And as a Democratic voter of his generation, he has no illusions that anyone can be confident of victory either way.
“All we have do is look back at all these elections that we thought we were in the bag… gosh, I think about all my political heartaches, Bush and gay marriage and Trump and all this stuff, everything has always been close in the polls. And that's just the nature of these things: you think this should be a done deal, but we're talking about tight, tight margins," he says.
“And so as much as Harris has had all these victories with fundraising, and she was clearly the winner of the debate and she's clearly the sane choice, it's still going to be a nail-biter. And so I'm anxious.”
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