It was 6 weeks until Election Day 2016 and Booz Allen Hamilton's Mike O’Shea and his wife, Sandy, still needed to figure out how to cast their votes from Germany.
It had been over a month since they’d moved to Darmstadt for Mike’s work in Booz Allen’s cyber business, but between marathon trips to Ikea and adjusting to life in a new country, there’d been no time to think about voting. It was important to both of them—“I haven’t missed an election since bootcamp,” Mike says—but now they worried it might be too late.
They considered trying to complete an absentee ballot at a nearby military base, but Mike recalled from his days in the Marine Corps that would involve long lines and inconvenient hours.
Seeking a better way, Sandy took to Google and discovered the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP). Using FVAP.gov, she and Mike had their absentee ballots filled out and printed in less than an hour.
“It was straightforward and easy,” Mike says. “We expected overseas voting to be a bigger hassle.”
Since 1986, it’s been FVAP’s mission to make sure Americans living abroad have everything they need to remotely exercise their voting rights. Prior to the 2016 election, the program’s website was running on severely outdated technology. To make the rapid and radical improvements necessary to meet the demands the looming election would bring, FVAP turned to Booz Allen.
