|
OVERSEAS
ABSENTEE VOTING
10/22/04
[Permalink] UPDATED
10/31/04
Trials and tribulations
for overseas civilian voters and military voters continue
Alix Christie writes in Salon.com
about the major challenges civilian voters overseas have had to endure
this year in trying to get a chance to vote - and provides links to
some useful websites for Americans living abroad. Here is an extract:
Then the panicked
e-mails start flooding in. Today, less than two weeks before the
tightest presidential race in memory, untold thousands of overseas
voters still have not received their ballots -- and clearly won't be
able to get them back in time. Late primaries and legal challenges
to Ralph Nader's appearance on the ballot delayed mailings from half
the battleground states. In swing states, including Florida, Ohio
and New Mexico, different versions of the ballot have gone out,
sowing wild confusion. In Pennsylvania alone, at least three
versions were mailed overseas, in successive, chaotic waves -- with
Nader and without him, plus a blank one-size-fits-all ballot with no
names at all.
Activists now fear
that huge numbers of Americans overseas -- both military and
civilian -- may be as disenfranchised as they were in 2000, when
anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of overseas ballots, depending on the
county, just plain never showed up. But, far from helping civilians,
the Federal Voting Assistance Program, has dragged its feet. A small
liaison office based in the Pentagon, the FVAP provides voting
materials to the departments of Defense and State for soldiers and
civilians abroad and preaches overseas election law to thousands of
local election officials back home.
The Government
Accountability Office excoriated the agency for losing thousands of
overseas votes in 2000, but the FVAP insists it has corrected its
problems this year. Frustrated civilian advocates, however, say the
FVAP remains biased and ineffective. Despite reforms, they attest,
it still has not shaken its Pentagon roots: It spends the bulk of
its energy getting out a heavily Republican vote among a
half-million service people -- but has failed the far greater
numbers of civilians (an estimated 4 million, by most counts) who
tend to vote a different way.
The tsunami of
overseas civilian voters this year has only made the inequity more
glaring. The agency was overwhelmed by a flood that has clogged its
fax lines, telephones and e-mail. It has blocked access to its Web
site to civilian voters abroad, given military voters access to
electronic ballot-request systems that civilians cannot use, and
subcontracted sensitive election work to a company with strong
Republican ties. For months, it failed to heed requests from the
State Department to post an emergency substitute ballot on its Web
site that will mainly help civilians living far from consulates and
military bases. Finally, on Oct. 21, with only 12 days till the
election, it will post a downloadable version of the federal
write-in absentee ballot, known as FWAB: a last-ditch device
intended for the precise situation in which thousands of overseas
voters now find themselves.
Those who've busted
their guts to get out the overseas civilian vote on both sides are
relieved but still angry. "Considering 2000 and the fact
everybody knew this was going to be a close race, they should have
seen it coming," says Joan Hills, co-chair of Republicans
Abroad. "The obstacles that have been thrown up are
incredible," says Jim Brenner, executive director of AOK
(Americans Overseas for Kerry), an arm of the Democratic National
Committee. Samuel F. Wright, director of the Military Voting Rights
Project of the National Defense Committee, and a Navy Reserve
officer who has spent 25 years observing the FVAP, says
"Frankly, I'm not impressed with them. They're sort of going
through the motions. I've been pinging on DoD for four years that
this is the perfect situation for the emergency ballot."
Voters who have
requested but not received their ballot by now can dispatch the FWAB
in its place. (If the real ballot subsequently arrives, election
officials are required to discard the FWAB and count the regular
ballot.) A million hard copies of the FWAB have been sent to
military bases in Germany and Asia and to the troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan -- two for every member of the military, Wright says --
who surely deserve them. But on the civilian side, the record is
spottier. The State Department, charged with helping civilians
overseas, ordered its consulates and embassies to stockpile the
form. But Democrats Abroad reports that many have been caught
short-handed and that direct voter requests to the FVAP have gone
unfulfilled. In one pathetic twist, employees of DaimlerChrysler in
Stuttgart had to beg forms from the military at the gate of the base
last week, a voting officer said.
Because so much hangs
on key states, and on the possibly widespread use of an untested,
little-known ballot, the potential for disaster is enormous.
"If this election is close, 2000 is going to look like a
cakewalk," says Margo Miller, a London-based lawyer for AOK.
"It's going to be so messy in so many places, the fact that the
FWAB hasn't been easier to get is inexcusable."
The Pentagon responds
that the two major parties began asking for the online FWAB only in
late September and that it has moved "mountains of
bureaucracy" to get the form online. Starting now, the tiny
bureau of 14 civil servants in suburban Virginia will get the word
out to election officials in 3,142 American counties that the
downloaded version of the write-in ballot is good to go.
But the program's
record does not inspire much confidence. Indeed, voters contacting
officials to ask about the ballot have been shocked at the ignorance
they've encountered. In Nepal, one embassy worker said the ballot
could be mailed from the United States, which it cannot; in Chester
County, Pa., an election supervisor had no idea what it was. Says
Wright of the Military Voting Rights Project: "Nobody has ever
heard of it. The FVAP does show up at meetings and presentations,
but I bet a lot of the 5,000 election officials don't go to those
meetings, judging from the very basic questions we get back."
While waiting for the
FVAP to act, both parties gyrated over the Internet. AOK put up its
own version
online with the disclaimer that no one knew if such ballots
would be accepted; Democrats Abroad and the two main registration
Web sites did not. Republicans Abroad then snitched the AOK form,
without the disclaimer, and put it on its site,
only to shamefacedly pull it off when told that, until the FVAP
formally approved it, nobody could use the darn thing. AOK finally
sent out 25,000 hard copies at its own expense to voters from swing
states who'd signed up on the Overseas
Vote 2004 Web site.
The overarching
problem is the scant resources allotted civilian voters, who
outnumber the military overseas by at least 8 to 1. While all
applaud the goal of making sure men and women fighting for our
country can exercise their right to vote, civilians point out that
they are Americans, too. And the FVAP has a history of favoring the
military, not least because the Department of Defense has a captive,
easily identified audience and far more money and muscle than the
State Department. Citizens abroad are far harder to find than
soldiers: Embassies have direct contact only with a small minority
of those who have registered to be alerted and evacuated in case of
a disaster -- though one might call mass disenfranchisement a
disaster of another degree.
Highly publicized
missteps this year have hardly restored faith in the FVAP. Civilian
voters still have trouble getting through to the agency and are
barred from the e-mail ballot-request and delivery Web
site that is available to soldiers from ten states. More
worryingly, a pilot e-mail voting system signed on to by Missouri,
Utah and North Dakota, in which soldiers can e-mail ballots to a
contractor that then faxes those ballots to local jurisdictions, is
being operated by Omega Technologies, headed by a former Republican
Party donor, according to the New York Times.
The Times also
reports that earlier this week two Democratic members of Congress,
Henry Waxman of California and Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, asked
the Government Accountability Office to investigate the FVAP. Among
their concerns is that the agency's online ballot-retrieval system
is not open to most civilians abroad.
Read the whole article for
more.
UPDATE 10/31/04
Here's an
article in the Chicago Sun-Times, via reader radtimes:
The military
traditionally votes Republican. In one recent informal survey of the
armed forces and their family members, 72 percent of respondents
said they favored Bush over Democrat John Kerry.
Many of the problems
that marred the military vote in 2000 are cropping up again.
More than a dozen
states -- including those too close to call -- missed the
recommended deadline to mail ballots overseas. One of the reasons:
legal arguments over whether independent Ralph Nader should be
listed on ballots.
More confusing are
conflicting state rules governing how to count an overseas vote.
Basically, military ballots must get to the servicemember's local
election official in the United States before a certain deadline.
The cut-off dates vary. Some states also require a notary or witness
to sign the ballot.
About 20 states,
including California, Texas and Alabama, accept faxed ballots from
overseas, but finding a working fax machine in war-torn Iraq and
Afghanistan can be difficult. In Missouri and North Dakota,
officials will accept e-mailed votes, but troops must complete a
series of steps on their computer for the ballot to count.
'A serious problem'
''There will be
thousands of military votes that don't get counted this time,'' said
Samuel Wright, director of the Military Voting Rights Project of the
National Defense Committee. ''I hope it's not as bad as 2000, but
it's going to be a serious problem.''
Gen. Richard Cody,
the Army's vice chief of staff, downplayed the idea that there could
be a repeat of 2000's voting problems this year.
''We worked extremely
hard on the absentee ballot program and my hope is every soldier who
wanted the opportunity to vote in the election was afforded that
opportunity,'' Cody said at 101st Airborne Division headquarters in
Fort Campbell, Ky.
Nearly 30 percent of
registered military voters did not get a ballot 2000, or got it too
late. This year, Wright estimates between 20 percent and 40 percent
of servicemembers will not have their vote counted because of slow
mail and differing state rules.
Since the Florida
debacle, the Pentagon has announced a series of steps designed to
make every military vote count. Several have failed.
10/12/04_2
[Permalink]
Pentagon blocks overseas
civilian voter registration on its website - while allowing military
voter registration. Under criticism, decision was reversed in part.
Farhad
Manjoo in Salon.com reported the original Pentagon decision
[bold text is my emphasis]:
On Monday, the
International Herald Tribune reported
that the Pentagon is restricting international access to the Web
site for the Federal Voting Assistance Program, the official
government agency that helps Americans living abroad register to
vote in the November election.
According to the IHT,
Americans who connect to the Internet using one of several
foreign Internet service providers have reported difficulty logging
in to the voting-assistance site. The Pentagon confirmed that it is
blocking traffic from these ISPs -- which provide Internet service
in 25 countries -- but it declined to say why.
News of the
Pentagon's traffic-blocking immediately aroused alarm and suspicion
among voting-rights activists, and it's not hard to see why. For the
6 million Americans living abroad, signing up to vote at home is a
daunting task, a Byzantine process that differs for each citizen
depending on his or her home state and even home county.
Over the past year,
the Federal Voting Assistance Program Web site has been widely
advertised all over the foreign press as the way for
Americans to get help on how to vote in the upcoming election. The
site, which is maintained by the Department of Defense, is a
nonpartisan, comprehensive, and official clearinghouse for voting
registration information. Now that it's been put off-limits to many
Americans just before registration deadlines kick in, activists fear
that Americans will be unfairly barred from voting this year.
Why would the
Pentagon do this? Officials at the Voting Assistance Program have
told some Americans living abroad that the blocked ISPs were havens
for "hack" attacks against the voting site; the Pentagon
had no choice but to block them in order to keep the voting site
secure from attack. But that explanation is extremely fishy, say
critics who see something more nefarious at work. The Defense
Department maintains all manner of sensitive Web sites -- for
instance, MyPay,
which allows military personnel to manage their compensation online
-- and it's had no problem protecting those from hackers while
keeping them open for legitimate uses.
"This is a
completely partisan thing," one Defense Department voting
official told Salon. The official, who asked to remain anonymous
for fear of being fired, is one of the many people in the department
assigned to help both uniformed military personnel as well as
American civilians register to vote. The offical described the
Pentagon as extremely diligent in its efforts to register soldiers
stationed overseas -- for instance, voting assistance officers have
been told by the department to personally meet with all of the
soldiers in their units in order to help them register. But the
department has ignored its mandate to help overseas civilians who
want to vote, the official said.
Not surprisingly,
political pollsters believe that uniformed military personnel,
especially military officers, lean toward Republicans in their
voting habits; American civilians who live abroad, meanwhile, are
particularly progressive. One recent
Zogby survey, for example, showed that voters with passports
supported Kerry over Bush by a margin of 55 to 33 percent.
The official -- a
self-described Democrat who adheres to requirements of
non-partisanship as a voting officer -- could see no explanation
other than pure political trickery in the Pentagon's decision to
block the FVAP Web site. "There is no way in hell that this is
not a deliberate partisan attempt to systematically disenfranchise a
large Democratic voting bloc," the official said.
It's easy to see why
the Bush administration might be worried about the prospect of huge
numbers of American civilians living abroad exercising their right
to vote. In efforts to register Americans living overseas, the
official has come across a host of people who say they're signing up
specifically to hasten Bush's defeat. "I've had so many old
people coming to register say, 'I haven't voted in such a long
time,' or 'The last time I voted in an election was when Kennedy
ran, but we've got to get rid of this man. This man makes me ashamed
to be an American.'"
In order to help
Americans living overseas to get around the Pentagon's block of the
FVAP site, the Voter Verified Foundation has launched a proxy site here.
Will Doherty, the executive director of Verified Voting, said he
hoped that the proxy would pressure the Pentagon into dropping its
access ban.
After enduring quite a bit of protests,
the Pentagon relented. Votelaw
summarizes an AP report:
The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer reports: The
Pentagon has restored access to a Web site that assists soldiers and
other Americans living overseas in voting, after receiving
complaints that its security measures were preventing legitimate
voters from using it.
The site,
www.fvap.gov, had been closed to users of certain Internet service
providers, because some hackers were using those providers to launch
attacks on U.S. government sites, military officials said. But that
had the effect of restricting legitimate traffic from those
providers, as well.
The move prompted
criticism from overseas voter advocates and a few Democratic members
of Congress, who said the security interfered with the voting rights
of Americans overseas.
In a statement,
the Pentagon said the changes will open the Web site, run by the
Foreign Voting Assistance Program, to most, but not all, users. The
site assists U.S. citizens overseas in casting absentee ballots. -- Pentagon
restores voting Web site access (AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
10/12/04_1
[Permalink]
Overseas voters,
especially civilians, continue to face major hurdles in voting and
continue to face disenfranchisement Via
Votelaw, I see this
New York Times article highlighting the major challenges for
overseas voters in actually getting their votes in on time [bold text
is my emphasis].
Election
officials concede that tens of thousands of Americans overseas might
not get ballots in time to cast votes. Late
primaries and legal wrangling caused election offices in at least 8
of the 15 swing states to fail to mail absentee ballots by Sept. 19,
a cutoff date officials say is necessary to ensure that they can be
returned on time, a survey by The New York Times shows. In
Florida in 2000, late-arriving ballots became a divisive issue when
some were counted and others were disqualified. The
tardy ballots are just one of several setbacks or missteps that
have affected the ability of the estimated 4.4 million eligible
voters overseas to participate in the presidential election. Some
have been unable to send their registrations to a Pentagon
contractor's computers, which are clogged by thousands of voter
forms. Others were denied access to a Web site designed to help
Americans abroad vote. And many voters simply have had trouble
navigating the rules and methods that determine how and when to
register and vote and that vary by state.
...
To help speed the
balloting process, federal officials activated a new system last
week in which voters can obtain absentee ballots instantly through
the Internet. But the Web site, myballot.mil, will be offered
only to members of the military and their families, quickly raising
concerns about fairness in a program that the Pentagon has been
directed to run for civilians as well. In addition, 23 states have
already declined to join the system for various reasons, including
security, according to Pentagon and state officials.
...
Other efforts
under way to help overseas voters include speeding mail delivery for
people in the military and a special federal ballot that all
voters can request if their regular ballot does not arrive from
their state on time. But election volunteers working overseas say
that many voters do not know the ballots exist, or if they do, do
not know how to use them.
Republicans and
Democrats are pushing hard to solicit these voters after some
assessments indicating that President
Bush's support among the estimated 500,000 members of the
military and their families overseas may have weakened. There is
little direct polling of soldiers, but Peter D. Feaver, a sociology
professor at Duke University, says surveys have shown that while
most officers are staunchly Republican, the rank and file newest to
the military has been more closely divided between the parties.
"Kerry will do
better in this group than Gore did,'' Mr. Feaver said, "but he
will not reverse the Bush advantage."
There is also little
polling of the 3.9 million civilians abroad. But last month, a
Zogby poll of Americans who had passports found that they supported John
Kerry over Mr. Bush, 58 percent to 35 percent.
The concern about
states not getting their overseas ballots out in time surfaced most
recently in a report this month by the newly formed United States
Election Assistance Commission, which found that 18 states did
not have systems in place to mail ballots at least 45 days before
the election. A commissioner, Paul DeGregorio, said in an
interview that states with late primaries did not have enough time
to turn around and send out their ballots overseas.
Of the eight swing
states that missed the 45-day mailing mark, only three will accept
ballots that arrive after Election Day. Overseas voters have
until Nov. 10 to send their ballots to Florida, which experienced
problems four years ago that prompted widespread calls for
improvements to overseas balloting.
In 2001, the
General Accounting Office examined overseas voting and found
numerous problems, from inadequate public education on the subject
to late ballot mailings. In surveying small counties throughout the
country, for example, the G.A.O., now the Government Accountability
Office, found that 8.1 percent of the overseas votes had been
thrown out mostly because they were late or not properly completed.
In response, the
Pentagon placed voting assistance officers in military units
worldwide and retooled its general Web site for voting assistance to
help more Americans navigate the labyrinth of local voting
procedures that apply overseas.
But some voters say the
Web site remains difficult to use and that program workers have
provided wrong information. Adam Hess, 26, a marketing
coordinator in Ottawa, said he was told that he could not vote
because he has never lived in the United States; he later learned
that was not true since he received his citizenship through his
American father.
In recent weeks the
federal effort has also been clouded by a series of missteps that
appear to have affected mostly civilian voters.
After blocking
Internet systems in more than two dozen countries from gaining
access to the general Web site, the Pentagon retreated last week and
says it is trying to find a less encumbering way to protect against
hackers.
Two weeks ago, Americans
in various countries complained to voting rights groups that they
received only ringing or busy signals when they tried to fax voter
registrations to the number provided by the Pentagon.
"I come from
Florida, and it's like, here we go again," said Timothy P.
Mason, a telecommunications analyst in Britain who said he tried for
two days before giving up.
In an e-mail message
to one of the voting groups, a Pentagon official said that military
installations were tying up the lines by faxing in hundreds of
registrations in single batches, and that efforts would be made to
accommodate the volume.
New questions have
also arisen about the private contractor hired by the Pentagon to
handle these faxes and unsealed completed ballots at its offices in
Alexandria, Va. The company, Omega Technologies, was sued last year
by Adams National Bank, which accused it of failing to pay off a
loan of more than $500,000. In court records the bank also said
Omega improperly gained access to a Pentagon computer to reroute
payments to the company's new lender.
A lawyer for Omega,
Daryle Jordan, denied wrongdoing by Omega and said it had
countersued in contesting the debt claim. Pentagon officials said
they were not aware of the litigation or another billing dispute,
brought in 2002 by a Nashville resort. Omega settled the second
dispute without admitting or denying accusations that it fabricated
a Federal Express record. Mr. Jordan said Omega did not consider the
litigation relevant to its Pentagon work.
An effort by the
Pentagon to create a broad Internet voting program collapsed in
February after criticism by security experts that the system was
prone to manipulation.
Ten states so far
have agreed to dispense ballots through the more limited service
that the Pentagon is announcing this week, according to officials.
Nearly half of the
states now also allow voters to fax back their ballots to election
officials, but the loss of privacy is causing concern among some
soldiers.
Scott Rafferty, a
Democratic activist lawyer in California, said soldiers had
contacted him to say they feared voting by fax. One, an Army
sergeant in Germany who asked not to be identified for fear of
retribution, explained his reservations.
"Some places you
have to hand it off to get it faxed because the machine is behind
the counter, at the finance office or personnel support
battalion," the sergeant said. "They should come up with a
better, more surefire system."
|
