Pentagon Gearing for Overseas Voting

[cal04]

The Pentagonis counting on its improved Web site to help an estimated 6.5 million Americans — U.S. troops at war and others living overseas — vote in the November elections.

Officials said Tuesday that the site includes information on how voters can request and get ballots by fax and e-mail rather than rely on slower postal service. The Defense Department is responsible for the balloting process not only for troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere but for all expatriate voters.

Michael L. Dominguez, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, noted the "special challenge of reaching the deployed warrior on the battlefield."

The potential voters include all 1.4 million active duty service members in the United States and abroad, about 1.4 million of their family members and 3.7 million Americans living outside the country, said Polli Brunelli, director of the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program. The total includes some 225,000 deployed in the wars and elsewhere around the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060905/ap_on_go_ot/overseas_voting_1

[savemefromdumbya]

1. they probably throw Democrat and Green votes away

[havocmom]

2. Yes, as a matter of fact, they do! Check out Palast on the subject

http://www.gregpalast.com/massacre-of-the-buffalo-soldiers

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.
Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

Support the troops, indeed.

[savemefromdumbya]

5. So overseas voting needs to be taken out of the hands of Pentagon

motion to congress needed!

[havocmom]

6. And think of all the laptops gone missing this year.

All the data on vets, active duty military, poor people in NOLA, workers for various federal agencies who may have to travel... Think about the possibilities. I'm sure the GOP has.

That laptop with data on millions of vets and over 80% of our active duty military personnel went missing a couple days before Cheney boldly proclaimed the GOP would prevail this fall.

And we at DU read about predominately DEM districts that are having HUGE purges in voter rolls. One DUer from TX reported over 25% of the people in her (mostly DEM) district have been stricken from the rolls of voters!

Looks like they are gonna steal this one the old fashioned way: Prevent citizens from voting.

EVERYONE needs to call their counties and make damned sure they really are on the lists of voters. I fear there will be hundreds of thousands (or more) who will be hassled at the polls or plain ol denied!

The GOP is really up to some dirty tricks. We need to support our troops by making sure they get to vote!

LTTE, call in on radio and TV shows, put info up where people can read about it. They intend to disenfranchise many Americans.

[savemefromdumbya]

7. they will be struck by lightning for their evildoing - write to Congress

[Xenotime]

4. They are lost somewhere over the Baltic sea.

[Earth_First]

3. "A fourth of all military absentee ballots will be lost or disqualified"

About one in every four of our military personnel serving overseas will be disenfranchised this year. The National Defense Committee estimates that 24 percent of all military absentee ballots filed this year will be lost, spoiled or otherwise made pointless by government interference or incompetence.

Typically, military ballots were challenged on technicalities. Did the envelope lack a stamp? (Postage is generally free for those serving in combat zones.) Did it arrive a day after the Florida deadline (even if the ballot was clearly mailed weeks ahead of Election Day)? Such "problems" are well beyond the control of military voters and wholly divorced from concern about fraudulent ballots. Yet in many cases, it was enough to get military votes tossed.

Time remains a critical issue. One reason overseas voters are disenfranchised so often is that states take so long to finalize their ballots. In Nevada's 2004 election, for example, lawyers filed so many challenges to the way the ballot appeared, the final version wasn't ready until late September. After the usual bureaucratic delays, many absentee ballots were not mailed until early October -- too late for, say, a sailor in the Persian Gulf or a grunt in Afghanistan to get it, fill it out and return it before Election Day.Slow and unreliable mail delivery compounds the problem. Many states require a 15- to 30-day notice to deliver a ballot to an absentee voter. Even if a soldier in the field requests a ballot in timely fashion, it may arrive too late to be useful. Or it may arrive only to find that the would-be voter has been ordered elsewhere in the interim. The reality of military life, especially in a hot war, often makes it extremely difficult to get mail to the intended recipient in timely fashion.

http://www.fairvote.org/?page=222&articlemode=showspecific&showarticle=2339