dianeduane | US expats, take note: one-step online voter registration finally available (Reply)

And not a moment too soon, if you ask me. This convenience comes to us courtesy of the Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonprofit / nonpartisan group devoted to cutting through the bureaucratic tangle for voters abroad.

The registration tool, known as RAVA, guides users through a process that first places them in one of three basic categories - overseas civilian, overseas military or family of overseas military - then asks for their home state, before guiding them to pages tailored to the laws and requirements of the appropriate state.

The swift system employs 128-byte encryption, the same as banks, to ensure security and privacy. Once the user downloads the completed form and prints it out to mail or e-mails it, all personal information is destroyed, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said.

The group does plan, however, to retain generic information on voters' states of origin and current whereabouts, which may help complete the still very fragmentary picture of the precise numbers and locations of overseas Americans.

This should make things a lot easier for when the next elections roll 'round...