Yahoo Lifestyle 'Fly 1,500 miles home with me to vote': These Americans are traveling far and wide to cast their ballot in time
“Fly 1,500 miles home with me to vote,” Kayla Iutzwig says in a TikTok video showing her packing a suitcase and heading to the airport. The 21-year-old lives in Los Angeles but is registered to vote in her home state of Texas. “My initial voting plan was to do a mail-in ballot, which I requested back in September and never received,” she tells Yahoo Life. In the video, she mentioned that her mail-in ballot request was declined — likely because she wouldn’t qualify for one in Texas.
“I think this election is the most important in my lifetime,” she says. “I traveled by plane, which was $350 roundtrip and took three and a half hours each way.”
Rebecca James also took to TikTok to share a series of videos documenting her voting process, which included a $700 plane ticket from Phoenix to Georgia. She told her TikTok audience that she had applied for an absentee ballot on Oct. 4 but still hadn’t received it two weeks later. Ultimately, she decided it was important enough to go in person. “I’m not f***ing around about women’s rights,” she said in one video.
Some of the travel has even been international, like one woman named Shanna who commented on a video saying that she flew from Italy to South Carolina to vote. Nicole Nina, a travel content creator, also posted about flying from Spain to Chicago just to cast her ballot.
Some of those who are making the trek, like Samantha Balsham, tell Yahoo Life that the effort is worth it to make sure their vote counts.
At 19 years old, this presidential election is the first one in which Balsham can vote. She’s from Bucks County, Pa., but attends college in Rhode Island. Like many others, Balsham was relying on an absentee ballot that never came. “Since I didn't get my ballot after days of consistently checking, I decided to just go home for the election,” she tells Yahoo Life.
She journeyed back home on Monday via a five-and-a-half-hour Amtrak train to make sure she’d get to her polling place on Election Day. All in all, casting her ballot will cost her 11 hours and $300 round trip. “Pennsylvania is a key battleground state, so I knew not voting wasn’t an option,” she says.
Maria Fernanda Garcia Castillo is a 22-year-old originally from Smithfield, N.C., four hours from where she now lives in Charlotte. She found herself in a similar situation when she requested a mail-in ballot and was told that she wouldn’t be able to get one since her name was misspelled in her county’s system. That meant taking unplanned time off from her job to make the long trip home and back. “Given how important this election was and knowing I live in a swing state, I couldn’t afford to let my vote go uncast,” she tells Yahoo Life.
While Castillo was able to vote early, many voters are still in the process of traveling on Election Day — whether that means catching an early morning flight or road-tripping in the middle of the night.
One woman was even able to crowdsource the funds to fly from New York City back to Michigan, where she is registered. She posted a TikTok video Monday evening saying that she was contemplating making the trip after her absentee ballot was lost in the mail twice — and was on a flight by Tuesday.
One lesson learned from the experience, according to Iutzwig, is that “the process to receive mail-in ballots should be much easier,” she says. But she’s happy to see so many people making the same effort she did. “It was completely worth it to me to participate in voting to hopefully secure a bright future for our country.”
