Miraculously, no one got a paper cut. But at least one volunteer mailing American get-out-the-vote flyers from a Toronto public library would have been fine with a little bloodshed.
“It’s for democracy,” Maya Stevens-Uninsky said, stamping “Election Materials” onto yet another envelope.
Stevens-Uninsky is one of more than 40 Toronto residents who volunteered at a “Democracy Action Hub” run out of the Deer Park neighborhood library by the local chapter of Democrats Abroad. In addition to sending 1,800 postcards, the volunteers texted 400 members registered to vote in Michigan, passed out yard signs reading “Americans can vote! from Canada,” stapled posters to telephone poles and set up “Vote From Abroad” tables at every street fair and neighborhood corn roast they could.
Their goal: Persuade Americans living in Canada to vote in the U.S. midterms during an election cycle in which the Republican Party and the Trump administration have imposed a series of challenges on overseas voters. The administration has removed guidance on overseas voting from a federal website; tried to give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight of voting by mail; and sued eight of the 38 states that allow Americans raised overseas to cast ballots in a parent’s home state, winning that challenge in North Carolina.
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“There’s a lot of desire to participate when you feel that your right to vote is being threatened,” said Valencia Richardson, a senior legal counsel at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “There is real energy from Americans abroad to participate in the midterms.”
The largest population of Americans abroad lives in Canada: 612,780 people, according to the latest U.S. government estimates from 2024. That means 1.5% of Canada’s population are Americans with permanent resident status, naturalized dual citizens and dual citizens born abroad. (The United Kingdom is a distant second, with 327,528 Americans, followed by Mexico with 313,602.) Add President Donald Trump’s tariff war, his attempt to rename Lake Ontario and a slew of other policies making cross-border relations more challenging — such as falsely accusing Canada of being a major source of illegal fentanyl imports — and you have a swath of angry Canadians urging eligible Americans to vote.
Julie Buchanan, a soft-spoken Alabamian who is chair of Democrats Abroad Toronto, declined to share how many members her chapter has, “but it’s in the thousands,” she said. In the weeks leading to the election, she has fielded about 10 requests a day from Toronto-area Americans who want help voting. She even drove to one older voter’s home and sat beside the woman as she registered to vote in the States and requested a ballot for the first time.
“That took hours,” Buchanan said. Like many Democrats Abroad volunteers, Buchanan moved north after marrying a Canadian; she met a man from Ontario at a blues festival in Mississippi. Austin Pettigrew, another volunteer for the organization, has a similar story: He joined an online dating app in Rochester, New York, and set the mileage radius wide enough to date in Syracuse. The algorithm matched him with a Canadian across the lake instead.
“We’d been chatting for a while before we realized we were in different countries,” Pettigrew recalled. He and his now-wife bonded over similar values and trips to do humanitarian work in developing countries. Volunteering at a Democracy Action Hub and posting a midterms sign in his Toronto yard was a natural extension of that activism, he said.
Jobs and educational opportunities, not dating apps, are the more traditional ways Americans end up in Canada.
University of Toronto sophomore Emily Chen said she plans to vote for Democrat James Talarico in Texas’ toss-up Senate race. She learned about the university’s Vote From Abroad club on Instagram and joined an energized group of students writing postcards at the library.
“I’m thinking about writing, ‘Vote now so you can later,’” Chen said, holding a pen and looking at her friends for guidance. “Is that too morbid?”
Nearly all Americans abroad have been guaranteed the right to vote in federal elections since 1972. The 2009 federal MOVE Act brought overseas voting into the internet age and required states to mail ballots at least 45 days before the election. The legislation also recommended — but did not require — that states extend voting rights to Americans born abroad who have not lived in the United States. Beyond those guidelines, however, states have considerable control over overseas voting.
Chen grew up in Plano, near Dallas, and found voting as a Texan in Canada in 2025 to be cumbersome at best. “You can’t do anything online other than check if you’re registered,” she said.
The first week of November happens to be a study break at the university, so she opted to fly home this year.
Americans crossing borders to cast ballots is one reason Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, an international elections scholar at the University of Kent, believes the official U.S. government figure of 247,295 Americans voting from overseas in the 2024 general election — out of an estimated 2.2 million people who were eligible — is too low. Anyone who voted in person didn’t make that head count.
“A lot of people do it,” Klekowski von Koppenfels said. “We just don’t know how many.”
She suspects bridge-and-tunnel voting is particularly prevalent in Windsor, Ontario, where an estimated 20% of the city’s population — about 41,000 people — are Americans, some of whom commute to Michigan for work.
“We have a very intensive effort there,” said Democrats Abroad international chair Martha McDevitt-Pugh. In 2024, Michigan tallied 21,128 overseas ballots; Democrat Elissa Slotkin won her U.S. Senate seat by 19,006 votes.
“Pretty much everybody in Windsor knows an American, if they’re not an American themselves,” McDevitt-Pugh said.
Swing-state status helped motivate Toronto resident Josh Hall to vote in the midterms. Hall moved from Charlotte to Toronto in 2022 after he was invited to join the National Ballet of Canada. He voted by mail in 2024 but became concerned this year that a Trump administration rule turning over their voter rolls to the U.S. Postal Service — a move ultimately shot down by the Supreme Court in mid-September — could disenfranchise overseas voters.
“I was worried about my vote not counting,” he said.
Fortunately for Hall, North Carolina is one of two dozen states that allows Americans voting from overseas to use an electronic portal, even though it’s a multistep process and, as Hall lamented, “I didn’t get a sticker” like he did in 2024. During both election cycles, he and another American in the ballet company struck up an accountability partnership to keep track of deadlines and where their ballots were in the pipeline.
“We knew we needed to be on top of it,” he said.
Hall voted for Democrat Roy Cooper in North Carolina’s tight Senate race, and in conversations with Americans in the States, he’s tried to explain, as diplomatically as he can, how Trump’s policies have affected Canadians.
“That’s why I’m voting,” Hall said. “I’m voting because I care about my friends and family back home, and I care about the country where I’m living now.”