Connie Sandlin is the  2024 Coordinator for Costa Rica’s phone-banking team. This means making hundreds of calls per week to overseas voters around the planet.


She is in charge of a team of 15 in Costa Rica, and sometimes more,  diligent volunteers who call potential U.S. citizen voters who live outside of the United States to encourage them to request and return their ballots in the 2024 election. As election day looms, they are sprinting toward the finish line, finding stragglers especially those who vote in key swing states, and helping them to get their votes done and counted whether sent by email, fax or courier depending on local and state rules.


Politics from a young age.  Connie’s first campaigning for Democrats happened just before she turned 14 years old, campaigning for Lyndon B Johnson.  Twenty years later, she was a delegate for Jesse Jackson at her Texas district Democratic convention in 1984.


U.S. politics from Costa Rica. When Connie and her husband moved to Costa Rica, their reasoning was not involved with politics. They had met kind people, they were bird watchers and concerned with conservation and the public universal health care was an attraction.


Connie got involved with Democrats Abroad Costa Rica (DACR) in 2018. She says her two main motivations for her volunteer efforts for DACR and the global organization of Democrats Abroad are her two granddaughters, ages 16 and 11, growing up in Texas.   Their futures are of the utmost importance to her.  


At that time, Connie coordinated voter registration events for U.S. citizens in Puriscal. She gradually increased her involvement and activities.  In 2022, she led all other phone-bankers on the planet in making calls to get out the vote for Democratic candidates.  When the global leadership of Democrats Abroad held the global meeting in Costa Rica this year, Connie was the Volunteer Coordinator of a team that was so efficient that some of the meetings were able to adjourn up to one-half day early!


As a retiree and volunteer in 2024, Connie finds phone-banking to be a flexible and productive use of her time to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. A substantial number of the more than 233,000 calls made globally are made by volunteers living in Costa Rica. One of the advantages is that there are individuals in Costa Rica who can speak either English or Spanish.
 

Connie keeps her team motivated with regular updates and shared anecdotes from phone conversations they have had, all without sharing names. Also, she hosts weekly ‘cocktails’ on Zoom where volunteers are encouraged to tell what they are drinking, sometimes it is only water or coffee and sometimes not, and their experiences from the week. There is laughing and a great deal of useful information is shared.


One of Connie’s favorite sayings reflects the importance of U.S. elections to the rest of the world:  “When the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches the cold."


Connie’s background made Costa Rica a perfect place for them to retire. And as you can read, she has been volunteering ever since. Connie and her husband, Dick, moved from Dallas, Texas to Puriscal, Costa Rica in 2008.  For them, it was the discovery of delightful people and culture on a birding trip during the last week of 2007. Connie persuaded Dick that living in Costa Rica would be a good choice. 


Pre-Obamacare, with both having pre-existing (but manageable) medical conditions, it seemed that medical debt and eventual bankruptcy loomed large as a possible future. The prospect of joining Costa Rica's Social Security, the national healthcare system, was another attraction.


Connie’s family took up bird-watching as a hobby when she was five years old. She grew up with family and Girl Scouting values of conservation and appreciation of nature.  She also followed in her mother’s footsteps doing volunteer work; in Girl Scouts, the PTA, Audubon Dallas, and more.  


Moving to a country full of biodiversity was an attractive prospect.  Also, Connie had taken “all the Spanish available” in high school. It was her minor at the University of Texas at Arlington where she earned her BA in Sociology/Social Work. She had experience communicating in various newsletters that she edited, as well.


In her adopted home in Costa Rica, Connie is an advocate for dementia education and the conservation of Costa Rica’s natural resources.  She and Dick have planted a half dozen mountain almond trees on their finca in hopes of attracting Scarlet Macaws back to their “corner” of Puriscal.   

If you need assistance, we have voter volunteers in many locations around Costa Rica. Please call us at 7137-3570 or email us at  help@votefromabroadcr.org.

For more information visit the Democrats Abroad website.

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