The Cost of Voting Overseas: Five Field Experiments on Expatriate Turnout

Despite comprising millions of eligible voters in an electorate where their numbers have exceeded victory margins in recent competitive elections, U.S. citizens residing abroad participate at substantially lower rates than their domestic counterparts. While scholars have tested institutional reforms to reduce voting costs for overseas citizens, limited evidence exists on whether targeted mobilization efforts can overcome the motivational and informational barriers inherent to expatriate electoral participation. We report results from five large-scale randomized controlled trials (N > 300,000) conducted among likely overseas citizens during two federal election cycles. We find that informational interventions designed to reduce complexity in the absentee ballot request and return process increase turnout by up to 3.6 percentage points (p < 0.01). Consistent with theories of voting as costly behavior, treatments that simply provided information on how to vote proved most effective. We find suggestive evidence that appeals priming motivation had a smaller effect. These findings extend the voter mobilization literature to an understudied population facing uniquely high participation costs and suggest that informational interventions can partially compensate for institutional barriers to political participation.