Faced with a voting program that at best is ineffective, and at worst partisan, ordinary citizens have been forced to pick up the slack. Wright's organization, for instance, blitzed the country's election offices with faxed alerts telling them how to process the write-in ballot. And it is thanks mainly to the efforts of two smart groups of expatriates that tens of thousands of new voters made it through the registration process at all. The FVAP distributed millions of registration postcards, but without help, the complex rules daunted many civilians. The State Department, stretched thin by new visa regulations imposed after 9/11, has nowhere near the resources in its consulates to help citizens that the Department of Defense has deployed for its soldiers abroad, a high-ranking official said. Though it has done its best to walk civilians through the 369-page "Black Book" of state-by-state election rules, "we literally don't have the staff to be able to do this," the official said. The upshot: There is a military voting assistance officer for every 30 to 50 soldiers, but the onus is on the civilian to fill out the form alone.

Democrats Abroad thus began the campaign season camped at card tables on foreign street corners and screenings of English-language movies, walking voters one by one through the Byzantine process. In late May, Dzieduszycka-Suinat and Mitch Wolfson, head of AOK Germany, looked at each other and said, in the words of Wolfson: "There has to be a better way." In July, they took the federal registration form, simplified it, and lobbed it into cyberspace. Beyond the 140,000 mostly Democrats who registered online, another 170,000 physically registered through Democrats Abroad, according to John McQueen, the group's international campaign chair. Thousands more signed up through another clever Web site, the Amsterdam-based Tell an American to Vote.

What infuriates AOK more than anything else, though, is the vast disparity in money and energy between the military and civilian efforts. Overseas civilians, who turn out at half the rate of the military, arguably need more help, they say. While FVAP spent its $5.5 million budget mainly to reach half a million soldiers -- a ratio that works out to $11 per vote -- the Democratic National Committee spent $50,000 on a Web site that worked out to less than 75 cents a vote.

Republicans eschewed pavement-pounding and bought dozens of ads in the military Stars & Stripes, International Herald Tribune and English-language papers in key countries like Mexico, Canada and Israel, which together host some 1.5 million eligible American voters, says Hills of Republicans Abroad. Registrations are up fourfold over 2000. The Bush campaign is focused on large communities of American retirees overseas and counting on its traditional bases among businesspeople abroad and the military, where, Hills says, "we're very confident we're going to get a strong majority."

Which way these hordes of new voters go is, in fact, the big overseas question -- assuming they get to vote. Democrats and Republicans alike see gold in both the civilian and military camps. What's undisputed is that the Bush administration has galvanized overseas voters as never before. "The entire world is against Bush, and we reflect that view that America has lost all its credibility abroad," says McQueen of Democrats Abroad. "I was tired of cringing in the supermarket whenever I spoke English to my kids, knowing how much we as Americans were hated," says Dzieduszycka-Suinat. Hills, for her part, reports that many Republicans, angered at what they see as unjust attacks, are coming out in equal droves to support the president. On both sides, stories abound of older Americans, and dual citizens who've kept their American passports, emerging like Rip Van Winkle to vote for the first time in 30 or 40 years.

In reality, the political affiliation of these voters is unknown. Both sides claim a 60 percent edge: Democrats, based on a Zogby study, say that Americans with passports tend to vote liberal. Republicans, meanwhile, cite international business and the conservatism of Pentagon civilian employees and soldiers. Yet both estimates are what military people call SWAG -- scientific wild-ass guesses -- about a woolly and ever-growing overseas population of civil servants, diplomats, employees of global businesses, students, journalists, artists, academics and, yes, soldiers on the battlefield.

Since January, when the Pentagon decreed "100 percent contact," every officer and enlisted man or woman has had a registration application pressed into his or her hands. Soldiers have been exhorted to vote at daily formation and while watching ballgames on Armed Forces TV, and they are reminded that "It's Your Future -- Vote for It" on the bottom on their paychecks. After the "horror story" of 2000, the military is "extremely vigilant" this time around, says Capt. Christina Maxwell-Borges, a voting assistance officer at the U.S. Army Installation Management Agency in Stuttgart.

At U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, voting activists and Americans who've worked for the Army for decades say ordinary soldiers are more motivated than they've ever seen. Even with the massive deployment of voting officers, a nonpartisan citizens group like the NAACP, which conducted registration drives on base, was swamped. "Often we couldn't keep up with the demand," says Billee Manigault, an NAACP volunteer. "There's a definite interest in participating," echoes Charles Keene of Democrats Abroad and the NAACP. "From almost everyone you heard, it was, 'You better believe I'm going to vote.'"

Despite several recent polls showing staunch support for President Bush among high-ranking officers, soldiers on base and Pentagon civilians active in Democratic politics say the mood in the military is far more mixed. The controversial mission in Iraq has brought a sea change in political attitudes on base, these observers report. McQueen, a retired military civil servant, says, "You're not seeing the kind of pressure to vote Republican you always had in the past."

The strong pro-Republican culture that emerged in the military in the wake of Vietnam has begun to splinter, many observers say. A report in the Washington Monthly last year described rank-and-file soldiers, who are disproportionately nonwhite, working-class and female, as increasingly diverging from an ideologically conservative officer corps. "For a long time here, Democrats were in the closet," concurs Trenton Browne, a military security contractor who works on bases from Heidelberg to Kaiserslautern. "Now in the lower ranks you hear people speaking openly about their dissent."

Gauging the overseas vote thus becomes a numbers game. Military turnout at home and abroad is high. More than 60 percent of soldiers overseas voted in 2000, double the record of expatriates, who turned out at a rate of 37 percent, according to the FVAP (though in both groups, the number of uncounted votes dropped those figures by at least 15 percent). Many expect even higher overseas military turnout this year. How many of those 500,000 active duty servicepeople will vote for Kerry, or Bush, is the question.

A survey of 4,000 servicepeople released last week by the Military Times, revealed strong loyalty to the president: 72 percent of those on active duty would vote for him, and 17 percent would vote for Kerry. In the view of military analyst Peter Feaver of Duke University, the early traction Kerry had with the troops has been lost by his recent hammering at the war as a "colossal mistake." Being a decorated Vietnam veteran doesn't improve Kerry's stock with the "career military" people polled by the Military Times, either; in fact, two-thirds hold the senator's long-ago antiwar activism against him.

The survey, however, concentrated on higher-ranking servicepeople, and is not representative of the rank and file. Along Heidelberg's main street, off-duty soldiers, some fresh from combat in Iraq, divided evenly between rejecting Kerry because "he doesn't support the troops" and supporting him "because a lot of us feel jerked around." "People think the military is totally Republican, and that's definitely not true," says one strolling soldier, a burly 30-year-old from Florida. "There's a lot of different views within the ranks." Capt. Maxwell-Borges, the Stuttgart voting officer, agrees. "Surprisingly, it's been really mixed," she says. "A lot of people support Kerry because he's a veteran and says he's going to increase military spending, and others are the more traditional pro-Republicans. But I've been on bases in the past three elections and I have to say that this time [political views] seem a lot more varied."

No one expects the soldier vote to swing to Kerry, but a softening of Bush's overseas military support could be significant. "Even 100 percent military turnout overseas only equals 160,000 additional votes," points out Brett Rierson, co-founder of the Democratic Hong Kong Web site. With activists guesstimating that the overseas civilian haul could be as high as 2 million, a strong showing for Kerry among enlisted troops could neutralize the Republican advantage.

In any event, it's unlikely anyone will know until well after Nov. 2. Several states, in a scramble to accommodate overseas voters' late ballots, have extended their deadlines. As it now stands, Florida, Washington, Iowa, Colorado and Illinois allow ballots to be received late, in some cases up to 10 days after Election Day. The Justice Department, at the prompting of the FVAP, has sued Pennsylvania to extend its deadline by two weeks as well.

Nor will Americans find out how effectively the overseas vote has been handled until "after the horses have left the barn," says Joe Smallhoover, legal counsel for Democrats Abroad. Voting reform passed by Congress in 2002 requires states to track overseas ballots, at long last. But more to the point, Smallhoover says, "we have to do more than reform the FVAP; we have to reform the whole system." Wright, the military voting expert, agrees. He advocates placing the whole overseas voting operation in the hands of the new Election Assistance Commission, a far better-funded agency created by the 2002 Help America Vote act that is supposed to help states improve their equipment and procedures.

All this, however, lies in the future. In the meantime, Democrats Abroad has formed a "rapid response" team to unsnarl problems voters abroad have encountered with their county election officials. Thousands of lawyers on both sides are renting office space in battleground states, ready to pounce on illegalities in stateside balloting and absentee votes. For now, overseas voters groping their empty mailboxes can only download the write-in ballot, send it in -- in the faith that local election officials will accept it -- and pray.

Recent Stories