By Michael Thompson, Contributing writerHow do you vote in a war zone?
Overseas military personnel have an extremely difficult time voting, according to research conducted over a span of decades.
One source pushing for improvement is the Pew Center on the States, which is conducting a 'Make Voting Work' project. There are seven aspects to the project and one of them is the 'Military and Overseas Citizens Voting Project.'
According to Pew's researchers, the 2006 mid-term election was typical in the miserable level of overseas military participation. This was a vital election, because it served as a public referendum over growing public displeasure with the Iraq War, and Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress through their anti-war positions.
However, those fighting the war had little hand in their elections.
Voter turnout among Americans living in the comforts of home two years ago was 39.8 percent. Among overseas military personnel, voter participation was barely half of that level, at 20.4 percent.
The United States has nearly 500,000 overseas military personnel when reservists are counted, including about 150,000 in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan.
The process seems simple enough. Obtain an absentee ballot and return it. But absentee ballots often are not available until late in the election cycle, and the military's mailing cycle takes 24 to 36 days for a communication to be sent and returned.
Bureaucracy also comes into play. Each of the 50 states has its own way of doing things, and absentee balloting among overseas military personnel has not been nationalized, despite repeated calls for this to happen.
Lack of participation among military personnel could prove even larger in the presidential election of Nov. 4, pitting Republican John McCain against Democrat Barack Obama. Polls incidate that more than 60 percent of Americans will vote, up from 55 percent four years ago. The low point was 49 percent in 1996.
Surveys show that 77 percent of American overseas personnel say they are "very interested" in voting, especially in presidential elections. But among this group, 30 percent told researchers from Pew's Military and Overseas Citizens Voting Project that they did not receive their ballots in time. Another 28 percent said they did not know how to go about getting an absentee ballot, and that nobody ever spoke with them in this regard.
The U.S. Department of Defense is supposed to provide outreach workers known as 'Voting Assistance Officers,' provided through the Federal Voting Assistance Program.
The effort to obtain an absentee ballot requires several steps, and so it is not easy, even for a non-deployed citizen who obtains an absentee ballot in their hometown. Pew researchers found that 85.8 percent of people who obtained absentee ballots in their hometowns took time to fill them out and return them. However, only 26.5 percent of ballots from overseas military personnel were returned on time.
Problems with absentee ballot applications, or absentee ballots themselves, went beyond the slow schedule of military mail service. Problems involved responses that were incomplete, invalid or illegible. Tens of thousands of overseas military personnel failed to realize that they needed to sign the ballot, state a political party preference and include a Social Security number.
Overseas military personnel deal with an "alphabet soup" of federal laws and regulations surrounding their vote. UOCAVA is the Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act. FWABs are Federal Write-In Absentee Ballots, included for use if a soldier's state ballot arrives late.
Pew's Military and Overseas Citizen Voting Project reports, on the bottom line, that the United States "has a fractured system of voting for our military."
