A few months after they were sworn in as citizens, Ms. Scott-Ker was transferred to Bangalore by her employer, Accenture, a management consulting, technology and outsourcing company, as its marketing director for India. She kept her eye on the election, filing the voter registration forms in August and getting the confirmation in early October. Then she discovered that an absentee ballot would require a separate application to the city Board of Elections.

“In this highly technological age and city, do we need to be mailing applications halfway around the world, just so you can get a piece of mail sent back to the same place?” Ms. Scott-Ker wondered aloud.

In a word, yes. So, she said, she followed the requirements “to the letter. I even provided an addressed envelope for the ballot to be sent back to us so it would be absolutely perfect, as it would have to have been for the India postal service.”

Still, no ballots came. The Board of Elections in Manhattan  its funding cut this year in a dispute with the mayor  has been laggard in sending out absentee ballots, officials say. Ms. Scott-Ker and her husband, a university instructor, knew nothing of that squabble.

“We realized we’re not going to get to vote, and we were all geared up to do this,” she said. “We thought, maybe a friend could get the ballots for us in Manhattan and have them couriered to India, and we could courier them back. There were so many ifs and buts. I didn’t want a bureaucratic process to get in the way of casting a ballot.”

Her determination is clear. Even so, was it really necessary to go to all that trouble to cast votes in New York State, where most polls give the Democratic ticket a lead of 30 percent or more?

“Then you’re relying on other people to do your job,” she said. “Apathy doesn’t work in a democracy.”