El Paso Times - Efforts on to Make Sure Soldiers Can Cast Ballots

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El Paso Times - Efforts on to Make Sure Soldiers Can Cast Ballots

By Chris Roberts

When soldiers deploy overseas for extended tours, they generally face a tangle of bureaucratic paperwork.

And if they forget to file changes of address, they risk losing one of the most precious rights granted by the democratic society they are sworn to defend.

Nationally, out of 992,034 overseas absentee ballots requested for the 2006 election, only 330,000 were cast or counted, according to a study by the federal Election Assistance Commission in Washington, D.C.

And more than 70 percent of the ballots that weren't cast or counted were returned to local election offices as undeliverable, the study found.

Those numbers also include U.S. citizens living overseas, who can face similar problems. However, overseas military voters as a block had the smallest percentage of ballots cast or counted.

The study used "cast or counted" because states have different ways of tracking the ballots.

Making matters worse, every state sets its own application and registration deadlines, and regular mail delivery from overseas can be inconsistent.

Only weeks before the 2008 presidential election, a number of efforts --Êstate, federal and local -- are under way to try to make it easier for soldiers' votes to be
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counted.

Possibly the most basic and important factor is for the soldiers to provide good contact information.

"We have troops that are en route and they have no address," said Susan H. Dillard, Fort Bliss voting assistance officer. "We're trying to make sure they have a forwarding address -- family, friend or anyone."

A state initiative has begun in select Texas counties -- including El Paso -- to make it easier to get a ballot, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, is pushing a measure in Congress that would speed up the process of mailing the ballot back to the United States.

The Texas pilot program targets counties with significant military populations and allows those active-duty troops to receive a ballot electronically through e-mail. The ballot is printed out and then returned by normal post.

Cornyn's measure was introduced both as a bill and as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill, which was passed by the Senate last week, but without amendments. The bill would direct the Defense Department to create a system "for the collection, transportation and tracking of marked absentee ballots of overseas military voters using express mail providers." The ballot envelopes are marked on the outside so they can be identified for collection.

"It should outrage every American that many of the men and women serving to defend those values are being denied one of our nation's most basic and cherished rights -- the right to vote and have that vote counted," Cornyn said.

To pay for the process, the bill would provide up to $15 million for the 2008 election and up to $20 million for the five-year period afterward.

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