There is an American election next Tuesday, and Marcia and I are doing our part to make sure at least California reelects some sensible progressive politicians.

Voting from Uzbekistan isn’t easy. In theory, we could have had Alameda County send us an absentee ballot at a hotel, but that would have required knowing where we were going to be. And most Central Asian post offices are known to take an month or more to deliver mail, so there was a good chance we wouldn’t have been able to receive it or send it back.

Fortunately, some recent legislation has guaranteed overseas Americans the right to vote in alternative ways, and California allows voting by fax. Alameda County faxes a ballot to us, we print and fill it out, and we fax it back. What could be easier?

Well, to begin with, they sent the ballot to us by mail rather than fax. That was no problem, though, because our PO Box service scans everything and we were able to download a much more readable copy than we would have received by fax. We printed it and filled out the ballot and the required declaration that we were waiving our right to a secret ballot (the person receiving the faxes would obviously see our votes).

And Uzbekistan has fax machines, right? Sure, and somewhere one might actually work. The machine in our hotel refused to send over the noisy line. So we went to the post office, which is supposed to have fax machines in every city. It didn’t have one. They pointed to a computer shop around the corner, but its machine was also broken. I had them scan the pages, but the scans were unusable. Marcia wanted to try some hotels, but I was frustrated and didn’t want to keep running up phone bills on failure.

I had to use every piece of hardware and software in my arsenal, but I think I got it done. To get a good quality scan at high enough resolution to fax readably, I photographed each page with my Nikon camera. I then edited each image to make it as purely black and white as possible, then converted it to PDF files. I tried to transfer it to my computer in the basement of my house in Berkeley, but my machine with the fax line was dead for some reason. So I signed up for a trial account at efax.com and emailed two 9 MB attachments. One has now been delivered and I’m waiting for confirmation of the other.

Frustration with technology aside, I can still be thankful I am a citizen of a country that still has reasonably free and fair elections. When Uzbekistan last had elections, the token opposing candidate was allowed to make only one campaign appearance – to vote for “President” Karimov, who of course won with over 99.9%. Karimov recently started his third term despite the fact that the country’s constitution forbids such a thing. Who bothered to check?