FVAP Releases Report, Provides New Model for Estimating Overseas Citizen Population

FVAP Releases Report, Provides New Model for Estimating Overseas Citizen Population

Alexandria, Va. — A new technical report released by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) provides a new model for developing estimates of U.S. citizens living abroad. The report furthers FVAP’s longstanding research effort to quantify the difficult-to-reach population in order to more effectively and efficiently target its voter assistance outreach for Americans living overseas.

To better support military and overseas citizen voters as they exercise the right to vote, FVAP is working toward improving its understanding of the size and distribution of the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) population. Although FVAP has current information on the number and location of Service members due to its alignment within the Department of Defense, estimating the number of all U.S. citizens living outside the United States is much more difficult as no official census of this population exists.

Developing a method for estimating the population of U.S. citizens abroad will allow FVAP to more effectively and efficiently allocate resources, target its voter assistance outreach to the greatest number of UOCAVA voters and identify the degree of success UOCAVA citizens experience when voting.

This report builds upon lessons learned from previous attempts to quantify the population — both internal to the Department and otherwise. It reviews existing estimates and:

• discusses limitations for FVAP’s purposes;
• describes several approaches considered during the research;
• details the methodology ultimately selected for the effort;
• presents the estimates developed from the methodology and discusses trends and noteworthy results; and
• identifies limitations of the effort and next steps for future researchers.

The report is available at www.fvap.gov/info/reports-surveys

#

If you experience any issues or have questions, FVAP’s call center is available at 1-800-438-VOTE (8683), DSN 425-1584, or at vote@fvap.gov. Toll-free phone numbers from 67 countries are listed at FVAP.gov. Find us on Facebook at /DoDFVAP and follow @FVAP on Twitter.