Millions who fled Zimbabwe amid its economic collapse blame President Robert Mugabe, but their inability to vote in elections this month may boost his chances to stay in power.
Opposition figures, who pose Mugabe's biggest electoral challenge yet, have urged them to return to be entitled to vote in the March 29 polls, but few are likely to.
An estimated 3.5 million have fled Zimbabwe to neighbouring South Africa and other countries, some risking their lives to make the trip illegally. They are unwilling to sacrifice everything to return.
Their families have also come to rely on money they send home to Zimbabwe, where economic meltdown with inflation over 100,000 percent partly caused the exodus.
"I wish I could go home and vote, but I risked too much coming here to go back," said 18-year-old Sibusisiwe Dube, who would have qualified to vote for the first time this year.
Now working as a childminder in an upmarket Johannesburg suburb, as a 16-year-old seeking a better life she braved crocodiles to cross the Limpopo river into South Africa.
Zimbabwe opposition leaders Simba Makoni, a former finance minister, and Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), would expect strong support to oust Mugabe among those who fled abroad.
"Many of you are in the diaspora because you have seen home turn into hell... You have the opportunity to change this," Makoni urges in a newspaper advertisement carried by South African newspapers over the last few weeks.
"Every vote counts, so please come home and let your voice be heard."
Analysts say the bulk of Zimbabweans who left the country in the last eight years blame Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF for their country's economic crisis, and would most likely vote against it in the presidential, parliamentary and council polls.
But the country's laws bar citizens from voting outside the country's borders, save for those on national duty - and many are in no position to make the trip home to cast their ballot.
Dube has no inclination to return to her village near Zimbabwe's border with South Africa after leaving in search of work in 2006.
