ROME -- In a spare room at the University of California Rome Study Centre, election day had arrived early last Monday. As students and expats trickled in, a group of smiling, middle-aged volunteers helped them fill out their absentee ballots, and clapped for them when they finished. When voters walked out, they helped themselves to a complimentary glass of soda and cookie. All in all, it less resembled a voting booth than it did a blood drive. Unfortunately, there were no “I voted!” stickers in place of band-aids.

 “Man, I was really hoping to get a sticker,” quipped Shawyon Fazel, a 20-year-old college student from California. He didn’t get his local absentee ballot in time, so he just wrote in one name -- Hillary Clinton -- on a Federal Absentee Ballot and called it a day. 

 “That’s fine with me, as long as I got my vote in,” he said. 

 Throughout last week, American voters like Fazel visited these pop-up voting sites throughout the city in order to fill out ballots and entrust them to the mailbag of the American Embassy, which will send them back to the United States to be counted. These booths were hosted by the Rome chapter of Democrats Abroad (DA), a DNC-recognized organization that focuses on registering Democrats who live overseas, but also provides non-partisan voting services. Expat Americans are a significant voting demographic — according to a 2014 State Department Census, 7.6 million U.S Citizens live overseas. Democrats Abroad has been around for 50 years, but this election has inspired (at least in Rome), both an increased voter turnout and a feeling that voting right now really is akin to donating blood. 

 “In 2012, there was plenty of voter interest, mostly from Democrats, but they weren’t thinking ‘oh my god, what if Mitt Romney becomes President?’” said Robert Samors, the Voter Registration Coordinator for DA. “This election, a lot of people are thinking ‘oh my god, what if Donald Trump becomes president?”  

 Susan Spafford, who has resided in Rome for the last half-century but uses her sister’s address in Minnesota to vote, put it differently: “It’s essential to vote for Clinton and defeat Trump, or at least until space travel becomes affordable.”

 For the 2012 election, Samors took around 250 ballots to the embassy for mailing. This year, he expects to take almost twice as many. Most of those ballots will be for Democratic candidates, which makes sense considering DA’s network, and that many Americans in Rome are students, academics and artists. However, on-site interviews revealed a voter base whose support for Hillary Clinton seems partially rooted in a revulsion towards Donald Trump. 

“As if it were a choice,” replied Trish Thompson when asked for whom she had voted. She and her husband, Joel Katz, reside in Philadelphia but live in Rome during the fall. For Katz, voting holds an unusually personal importance — in 1964, he was part of the Freedom Summer project to register African-American voters in Mississippi. He arrived in Jackson, Mississippi the day that three civil rights workers went missing, and left several weeks later, on the day that their bodies were found. 

 Katz and Thompson requested local absentee ballots so that they could vote for state elections and referendums. Many American voters in Rome, however, haven’t received their local absentee ballot yet, and therefore have used a Federal Absentee Ballot, which allows you to write in votes. Some voters in Rome take the time to search out their local elections and referendums online, but most preferred to just write in their choice for President and Congress. 

 Voting absentee often removes one’s vote from the election-night spectacle of CNN’s Magic Wall, as states and races are often called before the absentee ballots have been counted. The Presidential election could be called even earlier this year, the New York Times reports, because large numbers of voters are expected to vote early for Clinton in swing states. But the mere act of casting a vote, on both sides of the ever-widening aisle, feels significant in what is surely a historic election.

 “It’s an anti-vote,” explained LSU junior Michelle Jones, who had just written Donald Trump’s name on a Federal Absentee Ballot at the University of California center. “I already know who Hillary Clinton is, and I’m not voting for her.” When asked if the recent revelations about Trump’s predatory past had affected her decision, she responded with a firm “no.” 

 Metexia Lianos, who was born in Greece, grew up in Illinois and now lives in Rome, felt the exact opposite. 

 “What the Republicans came up with this year wasn’t serious,” she said on Saturdays session at St. Stephens School in San Saba. Growing up with immigrant parents, and then living abroad for long stretches of time, has made her acutely uncomfortable with Trump’s positions on immigration and foreign policy. “I just want all of these wars in the Middle East to end,” she said.

 But would they end with Clinton as President? She paused for a moment. In the background, the blue of the American voting booth stood out against the classic Roman background of faded yellow and orange. 

“I think Hillary would at least do it better than Trump,” she replied.

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