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Comment by negrit | Hacker News Reader

In France we have deputies(Kind of like congressmen in the U.S.) for expats. Deputies cover region of the world(Deputies for french citizens abroad). http://www.ufe.org/fr/vos-interets/representation-parlementa...

They 'make sure' our interests as expat are being covered.

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well you can do that because you have national elections, none of those in America as even the presidential election is technically 51 simultaneous statewide elections (well 50 + D.C.)

I never thought of that, every representative gets elected under a different rule. You could still do something like the Samoa, and get it organized by the State Department. That wouldn't fly with an actual voting power, but for consultative representation, I think that would be good enough. I guess for actual voting representation, either one State should grab them, or make a federal level election for "others" (where probably Samoa and friends, DC and other troublesome situations could be handled as well).

I must be missing something. I don't understand why not having nation wide election prevent the U.S. from having congressmen to represent those living abroad.

seats in congress are apportioned to states who then figure out how to divide them up, so while in theory a state could make an overseas district it's not something that could be done on a national level without some heavy modification to the constitution.

Since we only have two parties, each one doesn't want to do anything in the odd case it would give the other one an edge they don't know about. So things stay shitty.

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