Daniel sent us this one — and it's a two-parter. He's been thinking about what makes an election legitimate, and he's zooming in on a specific piece of the puzzle: how do you handle voting for people who aren't physically in the country on election day? Military personnel, diplomats, people serving the state overseas. The practical question is straightforward — how does the logistics actually work, especially for a massive operation like the U.The second part is more philosophical: should citizens who've left their country permanently, regular expats, be entitled to vote at all? Israel says no unless you're on official state business. is much more permissive. Daniel wants to know where these different approaches sit in the global picture. And honestly, this gets at something deeper about what citizenship even means once you leave.
This connects to what we were discussing before — the chain of custody question. Daniel mentioned those photos that circulate around election time, diplomatic staff posing with ballot boxes. It looks ceremonial but the procedural machinery behind it is genuinely intense. I want to start with the U.military voting system because the scale is staggering. You're talking about roughly one point four million active-duty personnel, plus their eligible family members, plus merchant marine, plus U.citizens working overseas for recognized international organizations. The Federal Voting Assistance Program, the F., handles all of this. The core mechanism is the Federal Post Card Application, the F., which serves as both a voter registration form and an absentee ballot request in one document.
It's a unified form. That alone is smarter than most government paperwork.
Here's where the chain of custody gets interesting. When a service member requests a ballot, the local election office back home — and this could be any of roughly seven thousand eight hundred local jurisdictions — sends the ballot through military mail channels. These are not regular postal routes. The military maintains its own mail sorting hubs, often co-located with major bases, and the ballot envelope gets a specific tracking designation. There's an entire expedited system that kicks in during the election cycle, with dedicated military mail flights.
It's not like someone's dropping a ballot in the APO box and hoping for the best.
No, and the accountability is layered. Every transfer point logs the movement. The ballot envelope has a standardized outer envelope with the voter's identifying information, and inside is a secrecy envelope containing the actual ballot. This two-envelope system is universal across U.When it arrives at the local election office, the outer envelope is checked against the voter roll, the signature is verified — most states require signature matching — and only then does the inner secrecy envelope get separated and placed with the ballots to be counted.
For diplomatic missions? The State Department has its own parallel system?
The Department of State runs the Voting Assistance Officer program. embassy and consulate has at least one designated officer whose job includes helping U.citizens abroad navigate the voting process. They're facilitators — they provide the F.forms, they can witness signatures, and crucially, they can send completed ballots back to the United States through diplomatic pouch. The diplomatic pouch is a protected channel under international law — it cannot be opened or inspected by host countries. So a ballot dropped at the U.Embassy in Berlin gets sealed in a diplomatic pouch, flown to the State Department, and then forwarded to the relevant county election office.
That pouch is protected by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Article twenty-seven — the diplomatic bag shall not be opened or detained.
Look at you, citing treaty articles. And that matters because the ballot is in a continuous chain of U.government custody from the moment it leaves the voter's hands at the embassy until it reaches the election office. That's not just a logistical preference — it's a sovereignty question. The host country has no right to interfere with that transmission.
Daniel mentioned the Jewish Agency in Israel's context. That's a different model. Israel doesn't have a general absentee voting system for civilians abroad — at all. The only Israelis who can vote from overseas are those on official state missions: diplomats, consular staff, Jewish Agency emissaries, and a handful of other categories like certain long-term trade representatives. And even then, the mechanism is tightly controlled.
Israel's system is deliberately restrictive. The Central Elections Committee designates specific polling stations at Israeli diplomatic missions for these official voters — maybe a hundred and fifty to two hundred globally, depending on the election cycle. The ballot boxes themselves are sealed, numbered, and tracked. Israeli diplomatic staff serve as the election committee members, sworn in for that purpose. And here's the key difference from the U.model: the ballots are not transmitted individually. The entire sealed ballot box is returned to Israel, often via diplomatic courier, and counted centrally by the Central Elections Committee.
You're treating the overseas polling station as an extension of a domestic polling station, just located in an embassy. It's a much more consolidated chain of custody.
And that reflects a specific philosophy about what voting is. In the Israeli model, the polling station is a physical place where the act of voting occurs under supervised conditions. The ballot box is a sealed container that travels as a unit. It's not disaggregated until it reaches the central counting facility. This is very different from the U.approach, where the ballot is an individual document that travels through a mail system and gets authenticated at the destination.
Which brings us to the second part of Daniel's question — the philosophical one. Should expats vote? Israel says: voting is tied to residence, not just to formal citizenship. If you've left the country and you're not serving the state in some official capacity, you don't get a say in who governs the people who still live there.
This is not a fringe position globally. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, roughly one hundred and fifteen countries allow some form of external voting, but the conditions vary enormously. About sixty countries restrict external voting to specific categories — military, diplomatic staff, government employees posted abroad. Another thirty or so allow all citizens abroad to vote but impose conditions: you must have been resident in the country within a certain period, or you must intend to return, or you can only vote in national elections but not local ones.
Israel is actually in the majority camp globally? Restrictive external voting is the norm?
It's more common than people assume. The fully permissive model — any citizen anywhere can vote with minimal friction — is concentrated in a relatively small number of countries: the U., Canada, the U., Australia, New Zealand, much of Western Europe. But look at Asia and the Middle East: India only introduced external voting in twenty ten, and even then it required physically returning to the home constituency to cast a ballot. The Philippines allows external voting but requires an affidavit of intent to return. Mexico has a massive diaspora in the U.but only introduced external voting in two thousand six, and the process involves registering at a consulate and voting in person there.
There's a spectrum. And the question Daniel's really asking is: where on that spectrum is defensible? The argument for permissive external voting is straightforward — these people are citizens, they have a stake in the country's future, they may be sending remittances, they may return someday. The argument against it is equally straightforward — they don't bear the daily consequences of their vote. They don't live under the policies they help choose. They're not paying most of the taxes. They're not sending their kids to the schools.
This is "taxation without representation" flipped on its head. It becomes "representation without taxation" — or at least representation without full participation in the social contract. Political theorist Rainer Bauböck frames this as stakeholder citizenship versus membership citizenship. The stakeholder model says: anyone whose fundamental interests are affected by a state's decisions should have a say. That would include expats who own property, who have family there, who plan to return. The membership model says: voting is for people who are full participants in the political community, defined by residence and daily engagement.
The stakeholder model gets stretched pretty thin when you're talking about someone who left thirty years ago, has citizenship in another country, and votes in elections for a place they visit once every five years. At some point, the connection becomes symbolic rather than substantive.
Here's the counter-argument worth taking seriously. Citizenship is not just a contract — it's an identity. People don't stop being Irish or Italian or Israeli just because they moved. And in many cases, they were forced to move — economic pressures, political instability. Telling someone they've forfeited their democratic voice because they had to leave feels punitive. Plus, diasporas often contribute enormously. Remittances to developing countries were over six hundred billion dollars last year — larger than foreign direct investment in many cases. These are people with real economic stakes.
That's fair. But I'd push back on the identity argument. Identity is subjective — it doesn't automatically translate into a right to participate in governance. Democratic participation isn't about feelings — it's about being subject to the coercive power of the state. You obey the laws, you pay the taxes, you live with the consequences — you get a say. If you're outside the jurisdiction, you're not subject to most of that coercive power.
Unless the state reaches out and taxes you anyway. is one of only two countries in the world, along with Eritrea, that taxes based on citizenship rather than residence. An American living in Paris is still filing U.tax returns, still potentially owing U.taxes above certain thresholds. That changes the moral calculus. If the state is going to reach across borders and extract revenue from you, it's much harder to argue you shouldn't have a voice.
That's a important point. citizenship-based taxation system creates a symmetry argument: if you're subject to the state's fiscal authority, you should have electoral representation. For most other countries, the tax obligation ends when you leave. Israel doesn't tax non-resident citizens on their foreign income. So the Israeli position is internally consistent — no taxation, no representation.
That consistency matters. Let me give you a concrete example. In twenty sixteen, the U.held the Brexit referendum. British citizens living abroad for more than fifteen years were not allowed to vote — roughly three million people. Many had deep ties to the U., owned property, had family there. The referendum passed by about one point three million votes. So the exclusion of long-term expats potentially changed the outcome. has since abolished the fifteen-year rule — as of twenty twenty-four, all British citizens abroad can vote for life. But the debate was intense. One side said: these are citizens, this decision affects them profoundly. The other side said: they won't live with the daily consequences of leaving the E.
That's the tension in its purest form. The Brexit case also highlights the question of time. How long is too long? Some countries have a sunset clause — Ireland allows external voting only if you've been resident within the last eighteen months. Australia requires you to have been on the electoral roll and to intend to return within six years. These are attempts to draw a line.
The Australian model is particularly interesting because voting is compulsory there — you can be fined for not voting. But for overseas citizens, it's only compulsory if you intend to return. If you've left permanently, you can deregister. The six-year rule is an explicit acknowledgment that the connection fades over time.
What about countries that have gone in the opposite direction and actively court the diaspora vote? I'm thinking of the Dominican Republic, where overseas voters are a significant electoral bloc and politicians campaign abroad.
The Dominican Republic has over two million citizens abroad, mostly in the U.They have dedicated overseas electoral districts — seven of them — that elect their own representatives to the Dominican Congress. So it's not just voting in national elections; they have direct legislative representation. Italy does something similar — it has overseas constituencies that elect twelve deputies and six senators. This is a model that says: the diaspora is a permanent, valued part of the nation, and their interests deserve specific representation.
That's a radically different theory of the nation. It says the nation is not a territory — it's a people, wherever they happen to be. Almost a pre-Westphalian concept of political community.
It's gaining traction. Technology makes it easier to maintain ties across borders — you can follow the news in real time, participate in political discussions online, send money instantly. The practical barriers that once made overseas voting seem absurd have largely dissolved. So the philosophical case for restricting expat voting gets weaker as the world gets more connected.
There's a countervailing concern. Democratic legitimacy depends on the perception that elections reflect the will of the governed. If a significant portion of the electorate doesn't live in the country, doesn't experience the consequences of its policies, and may not even speak the language fluently anymore — I'm thinking of third-generation diaspora communities — then the connection between voting and accountability starts to fray. You could end up with a situation where the people who actually live in a country are governed by decisions made by people who don't.
This is not hypothetical. In the two thousand six Italian general election, the overseas constituencies were crucial to Romano Prodi's narrow victory. In the twenty nineteen Ukrainian presidential election, the overseas vote was a significant factor. And there's an ongoing debate in several Balkan countries about whether diaspora voters, who tend to be more nationalist, should have such influence over domestic politics.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. If diaspora voters are systematically different from domestic voters in their political preferences — more conservative, more nationalist — is that a feature or a bug? One argument says: that's democracy, every citizen gets a voice. The other says: you're giving disproportionate influence to people whose views may be frozen in time, based on the country they left rather than the country that exists.
There's research on this. A study of Eastern European countries found that diaspora voters do tend to support more nationalist parties and are less supportive of redistributive policies — which makes intuitive sense, since they're not the ones receiving or paying for those benefits. But the effect varies by country and by generation. First-generation emigrants often maintain strong ties and nuanced views. By the third generation, the connection is more symbolic.
Let me bring this back to Daniel's framing, because I think he put his finger on something important when he distinguished between people serving the state overseas and people who just moved because they felt like it. There's an intuitive moral difference that most people recognize. The diplomat in the embassy, the soldier on a base — they didn't leave. They were sent. They're still serving. Denying them a vote would be perverse. But the software engineer who moved to New York for a startup and plans to stay there — that's a different category.
That distinction is written into the laws of many countries. The Israeli model is the clearest example — only official state emissaries. But even countries with broad expat voting often have special provisions for military and diplomatic personnel. has the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, the U., which covers both military and civilian overseas voters, but the military provisions are more robust — faster timelines, more support infrastructure. The underlying recognition is: military personnel didn't choose to be abroad, they're there under orders, and the state has a special obligation to facilitate their participation.
There's a practical argument too. Military voters are concentrated on bases. You can set up voting assistance officers, coordinate with unit commanders, plan logistics. It's administratively tractable in a way that serving a diffuse population of individual expats scattered across the globe is not. If you're a U.citizen living in rural Thailand, getting a ballot to you and back is difficult. If you're on a military base in Germany, there's an entire support system.
The logistical challenge is real. tries to solve it through technology — the F.has an online assistant, and many states allow ballots to be returned electronically, either by email or through a secure portal. But electronic ballot return is controversial. Cybersecurity experts consistently warn that email is not secure enough for ballot transmission. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended in twenty eighteen that electronically returned ballots should be avoided until robust verification systems are in place. But for a service member on a submarine or in a remote forward operating base, the alternative might be not voting at all.
That's a genuine tension. The perfect is the enemy of the good. A ballot returned by email with some residual risk is better than no ballot at all, if the person would otherwise be disenfranchised. But you don't want to create a system where electronic return becomes the norm and the attack surface expands dramatically.
That's why most states that allow electronic return limit it to military and overseas voters under U.— it's a narrow exception, not a general rule. About thirty states allow some form of electronic ballot return for these specific populations. The rest require physical return by mail. It's an uneasy compromise.
Shifting back to the philosophical question — I want to explore the strongest version of the argument for broad expat voting. It goes something like this: in an interconnected world, the effects of a country's policies don't stop at its borders. A country's environmental regulations affect the global climate. Its trade policies affect workers abroad. Its foreign policy can start or prevent wars. If you're a citizen of that country living abroad, you are affected by those decisions, sometimes profoundly. And you may have no other democratic avenue — you can't vote in your country of residence because you're not a citizen there. So denying you a vote in your country of origin leaves you voiceless in both places.
This is the "democratic deficit" argument, and it's strongest for people who are transnational — they maintain ties to both countries, they're affected by the policies of both, but they only have political rights in one. There's a related argument about reciprocity. If Country A allows Country B's expats to vote, but Country B doesn't reciprocate, Country B's citizens abroad are at a disadvantage. This has led to calls for bilateral agreements on expat voting rights.
The reciprocity argument cuts both ways. If every country allowed all its expats to vote, you'd have massive overlapping electorates. Millions of people would be voting in two countries, maybe three, for governments that govern different territories. That starts to blur the lines of democratic accountability in a way that I think is problematic.
We see this tension playing out with dual citizens. There are people who hold U.and Israeli citizenship, live in Israel, pay taxes in Israel, serve in the Israeli military — but they can still vote in U.Is that legitimate? They're not subject to most U.They don't pay U.taxes unless their income is very high. But they're citizens, and the U.says citizenship is enough. Israel says no — if you've made your life elsewhere, you vote in Israel or you don't vote at all.
The dual citizenship question makes the philosophical problem even sharper. Now you're not just asking whether an expat should vote — you're asking whether someone who is a full participant in another political community should have a voice in yours. And the answers different countries give reveal fundamentally different conceptions of what citizenship means.
Let me give you a taxonomy, because it helps clarify the landscape. Roughly speaking, countries fall into four categories. Category one: no external voting at all — rare but it exists. Category two: restricted external voting for state personnel only — military, diplomats, government employees. This is Israel's model. Category three: qualified external voting for all citizens, but with conditions — time limits, intent to return, registration requirements. Australia, New Zealand, Canada until recently. Category four: universal external voting with minimal restrictions. post-twenty twenty-four, Italy, the Dominican Republic.
I'd add a fifth category that's emerging: external voting with dedicated representation. The Italian and Dominican models where the diaspora elects its own representatives. That's a qualitatively different approach — it says the diaspora is a distinct constituency with distinct interests, not just an extension of the domestic electorate.
That model solves some of the accountability problems we've been discussing. If the diaspora has its own representatives, they can advocate for diaspora-specific issues — consular services, citizenship transmission, voting access. The domestic population doesn't feel like outsiders are determining their local governance, and the diaspora gets a voice on the issues that actually affect them.
It also institutionalizes a division between "us" and "them" that some people find uncomfortable. It says the nation is permanently bifurcated between those who stayed and those who left. And it raises the question: if the diaspora gets dedicated representation, what about internal minorities? Should there be dedicated seats for different regions, different ethnic groups? Where do you stop?
That's the slippery slope argument, and it has some force. But dedicated diaspora representation already exists and functions without collapsing into full-blown corporatism. It's a limited, practical accommodation, not a wholesale redesign of representation.
Let me pull on a thread Daniel raised that we haven't fully addressed. He mentioned the "extraordinary rights" of the Jewish Agency in Israeli elections. That's a specific institutional arrangement worth explaining.
The Jewish Agency is a quasi-governmental organization that predates the state of Israel. It was the primary institution of the Zionist movement during the British Mandate, and after independence, it continued with a mandate focused on immigration and connecting the Jewish diaspora to Israel. Its emissaries — the shlichim — are posted to Jewish communities around the world. They're not diplomats, but they're serving in an official capacity recognized by the state. And because of that recognition, they and their families are entitled to vote in Israeli elections from abroad, at special polling stations under the same sealed-ballot-box system used for diplomats.
It's not just government employees in the narrow sense — it's people serving in roles the state deems to be in the national interest. That's a broader category, but it's still bounded. You can't just declare yourself a Jewish Agency emissary and get a ballot. There's a formal designation.
And this gets at a deeper feature of Israeli political culture: the distinction between the state and the government. The Jewish Agency is not a government body, but it serves the state. Voting is a right of participation in the state, not just in the selection of a government. And the state recognizes certain forms of service — military, diplomatic, educational, cultural — as keeping you within the political community even if you're physically abroad.
That's a rich concept. The political community is defined by a relationship to the national project. If you're contributing to that project in a recognized way, you're in. If you've left to pursue your own private interests, you're out — or at least you need to come back to participate.
This is where the U.model represents a fundamentally different philosophy. doesn't ask what you're doing abroad or why you left. If you're a citizen, you can vote. The state doesn't make a judgment about whether your absence is legitimate or whether you're "contributing" to the national project. Citizenship is a status, not a relationship.
Which reflects the American conception of citizenship as a right that attaches to the individual, not a privilege contingent on service. It's Lockean — you have rights by virtue of being a person and a citizen, and the state doesn't get to take them away based on its assessment of your life choices. That's philosophically coherent. But it does create the accountability problem. The American in Paris who votes in U.elections but lives entirely under French law — there's a mismatch between the scope of her political power and the scope of her legal obligations.
Yet, the American in Paris is still a U.She can return at any time. Her children will be U.government can conscript her in a draft, can tax her worldwide income, can deny her entry if she doesn't pay those taxes. The state's reach is global for its citizens. So the argument that she shouldn't vote because she's not "subject to the laws" is empirically false — she's subject to quite a lot of them.
That's the strongest counterargument, and it's why the U.position is more defensible than it might initially appear. has chosen to maintain a thick relationship with its citizens abroad — taxation, military obligations, consular protection, citizenship transmission. Given that thick relationship, broad voting rights follow logically. The question is whether that thick relationship is itself justified. And that's a much bigger debate.
Which is probably a whole other episode. But it connects to Daniel's core question: should expats vote? The answer depends on what kind of relationship the state maintains with its expats. If the state taxes them, can conscript them, and claims their allegiance in a meaningful way, then voting is part of that package. If the state essentially says "you've left, good luck, we'll see you when you visit," then restricting the vote is more defensible. The problem arises when states want the benefits of diaspora engagement — remittances, lobbying, soft power — without granting the corresponding political rights.
That's a sharp point. There are countries that actively court diaspora investment, encourage diaspora tourism, and deploy diaspora networks for diplomatic influence, while simultaneously telling those same people they have no say in governance. That's having your cake and eating it too.
It's politically unsustainable in the long run. As diasporas become more organized and more connected, they demand political voice. Mexico's external voting reforms were driven by decades of diaspora activism. The Dominican Republic's overseas congressional seats were a response to the growing power of Dominicans in the U.'s abolition of the fifteen-year rule came after years of campaigning by groups like British in Europe. The trajectory is toward greater inclusion, not less.
Is that trajectory good? I'm ambivalent. On one hand, more inclusive democracy sounds good. On the other, I worry about the hollowing out of the territorial basis of democratic legitimacy. If anyone with a passport can vote forever, regardless of where they live, elections become decoupled from the lived experience of the people who actually inhabit the country. That seems corrosive over time.
I think the answer is in the institutional design. You can have broad expat voting without hollowing out territorial representation if you build the right structures. Dedicated diaspora constituencies are one approach. Time-limited voting rights are another — you get to vote for ten years after leaving, and then you need to re-establish residence. Weighted voting is a more radical idea — expat votes count for less in certain types of elections — but that gets into very tricky constitutional territory.
Weighted voting would be a political non-starter almost everywhere. But the time-limit approach has real merit. It acknowledges that the connection fades, without making a binary judgment that you're either in or out. It's a gradual sunset rather than a cliff.
Australia's six-year rule is the closest existing model. And it's paired with a requirement to demonstrate intent to return. So it's not just a clock running out — it's a substantive test of ongoing connection. That seems like a reasonable middle ground between "vote forever" and "you left, you're out.
The "intent to return" test is interesting, but it's also manipulable. Anyone can declare an intent to return. How do you verify it? It becomes a bureaucratic exercise in line-drawing.
Which is why most countries that use it keep it light-touch — a signed declaration is enough. The point is not to create an investigative apparatus, it's to establish a principle. You're asserting a continued stake in the country's future. That assertion matters, even if it's not independently verified.
Let me come back to something Daniel mentioned in passing — the "ballot box in a backpack" image. He was making the point that the chain of custody for overseas voting is extremely robust, not casual at all. And I think that's worth underlining, because there's a popular skepticism about absentee voting — the idea that ballots floating around in the mail are somehow inherently less secure than in-person voting. But the reality, at least for the systems we've been discussing, is that the controls are often more stringent, not less.
The military and diplomatic voting systems have multiple layers of verification, tracking, and physical security that in many ways exceed what happens at a domestic polling station. At a domestic polling station, you show up, someone checks your name against a list, you get a ballot, you put it in a box. The chain of custody from there depends on the integrity of the poll workers and the observers. In the overseas military system, every transfer is logged, every envelope is barcoded, every signature is matched. It's a more documented process.
The diplomatic pouch system is arguably the most secure method of document transmission that exists. It's protected by international treaty, handled by trained diplomatic staff, tracked at every stage. A ballot traveling from the U.Embassy in Tokyo to the State Department via diplomatic pouch has a more secure journey than a ballot traveling from a polling station in rural Ohio to the county election office in the back of a poll worker's car.
That's a provocative comparison, but I think it's accurate. The weak points in election security are often domestic and mundane — understaffed county election offices, outdated voter rolls, insufficient training for temporary poll workers. The overseas voting systems, because they're designed for a challenging environment, tend to have more robust protocols built in.
Which is not to say they're perfect. No system is. But the popular image of overseas voting as a security risk doesn't match the reality.
That connects back to the legitimacy question Daniel started with. Elections are legitimate not because they're perfect — no election is perfect — but because the process is transparent, the rules are followed, and the participants broadly accept the outcome. The overseas voting piece is just one component of that larger system. Different countries have made different choices about how inclusive to make it, based on their history, their political culture, and their conception of citizenship.
Where does that leave us on Daniel's big question? Should expats vote? I think the honest answer is: it depends on the relationship the state maintains with them. If the state taxes them, can conscript them, and actively regulates their conduct, then voting is part of a reciprocal package of rights and obligations. If the state has a thinner relationship — you've left, you're not taxed, you're not subject to most laws — then restricting the vote to those who return is defensible. The hard cases are in the middle, where the relationship is partial and contested.
I'd add that the global trend is toward greater inclusion, driven by technology, diaspora activism, and changing conceptions of citizenship. But that trend is not without risks. The challenge for democracies is to design systems that include their diasporas without undermining the territorial basis of democratic legitimacy. Dedicated representation, time-limited voting rights, and robust chain-of-custody procedures are all pieces of that puzzle.
One last thought. Daniel mentioned that Israel's approach — no expat voting except for official emissaries — is sometimes criticized as undemocratic. But I think that criticism misses something. Democracy is not just about maximizing the number of people who can vote. It's about creating a political community where the people who are governed have a meaningful say in their governance. If you expand the electorate to include people who aren't governed by the resulting decisions, you're not necessarily making the system more democratic — you might be diluting the democratic character of the system for those who are governed. That's a trade-off worth taking seriously.
It's the difference between democracy as a procedure and democracy as a relationship. The procedural view says: more voters equals more democracy. The relational view says: democracy requires a specific kind of connection between the voter and the governed community. I think Israel's position is coherent within the relational view. Whether you find that view persuasive is a deeper philosophical question.
That's probably where we should leave it — with the question, not the answer. Daniel, we've given you the logistics and the philosophy. The rest is up to the citizens.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The average cumulus cloud weighs approximately one point one million pounds — roughly the same as one hundred elephants — and stays aloft because its weight is distributed across millions of tiny water droplets spread over a vast volume of rising warm air.
A million pounds floating over our heads.
That's going to make my next picnic significantly more stressful.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you listen. We'll be back next time.
With hopefully fewer airborne elephants.
