Citizens Without a Country: The Democratic Legitimacy Crisis of Non-Resident Birthright Voting in U.S. Federal Elections

This working paper examines the democratic legitimacy of federal voting rights held by citizens who live permanently outside the United States, including people who have never lived there. It connects external voting to residency, taxation, civic integration, military service, comparative electoral design, and the question of whether political voice should track exposure to domestic policy consequences.

• It treats citizenship and voting as institutional relationships that carry both rights and responsibilities, rather than as labels that answer every legitimacy question by themselves.
• The analysis compares the U.S. external-voting model with broader democratic design questions about residency, accountability, and political membership.
• Its proposed criteria are presented as a framework for debate and testing, not as enacted election law or a settled constitutional conclusion.

This document is presented as a public reading copy connected to the Independent Observer program. Its source trail and status remain visible so readers can distinguish a working preprint from a released publication.

The Volume II resource map places this paper in the sovereignty, institutions, and democratic-membership line of inquiry. The website publishes a short synopsis and the public SSRN link; it does not expose the matching source manuscript.

The public SSRN record lists 17 downloads and 108 abstract views in the indexed snapshot checked on 30 August 2026. Usage counts change over time and are not peer review or evidence that the paper's legitimacy framework is correct. The paper is a working argument about electoral design, not individualized legal advice.