Texas Times Weekly - Remembering Our Brave Service Members This Memorial Day & Protecting Their Rights

Statement

Texas Times Weekly - Remembering Our Brave Service Members This Memorial Day & Protecting Their Rights

By: U.S. Sen. John Cornyn

The month of May is dedicated to honoring our military service members. It is Military Appreciation Month, during which we mark Armed Forces Day, as well as Memorial Day, which falls this year on May 25.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance - a day when we honor the heroes who gave their lives to defend our land of liberty. Some of these heroes were members of the earliest generation of Americans - those who endured the snows of Valley Forge - and died to win our independence.

Some of those heroes were members of the greatest generation of Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy and the South Pacific, sacrificing their own lives to liberate millions from the darkness of tyranny. And some of those heroes grew up as part of the current generation of Americans - who answered the call to military service in a new century - who died to defend our homeland from terror - and to bring freedom to a part of the world that has known too little of it.

Every generation of Americans has produced heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. And every year, we come together to honor that sacrifice - and to express our profound gratitude for it. For their families, Memorial Day is the formal expression of a deeply personal experience. It is a time to remember the touch of a hand, the warmth of a smile, and the grief of a telegram that changed life forever.

As we all know, our military service members put their lives on the line to protect the rights and freedoms of all Americans. In return, we have a duty to provide them with every resource we can to support them. Yet the country they defend has repeatedly denied our troops one of our most cherished rights - the right to vote.

This year, Congress should show its appreciation for our men and women in uniform by protecting their right to vote. In recent elections, American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines have encountered substantial roadblocks in the voting process, especially those who are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. To address this national disgrace, I am pushing a bipartisan bill in the Senate, the Military Voting Protection Act.

During the 2006 election cycle, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, less than half of the military voters who requested absentee ballots were successful in casting them. According to a 2006 Department of Defense report, only 59 percent of surveyed service members even knew where to obtain voting information on their installation, and only 40 percent had actually received assistance from their units' designated Voting Assistance Officers. A recent Congressional Research Service survey of seven states with high military populations showed that the problems continued in the 2008 election, with more than a quarter of the ballots requested by uniformed and overseas voters going either uncollected or uncounted.

Our troops report many procedural hurdles when trying to participate in federal, state, and local elections. Most states have inadequate processes and unreasonable timelines in place for transmitting blank absentee ballots to our troops, and the methods available to these service members for returning completed ballots to their local election officials are both slow and antiquated. Moreover, there are a myriad of absentee voting rules and regulations that can be extremely confusing and vary widely with each state.

The process is clearly broken, and there is no excuse for not stepping up to challenge the status quo and streamline the process. We ask so much of our troops, and in return we have given them a voting system that is perplexing, frustrating, slow, and often dysfunctional. They deserve better.

The bill I introduced can help address one of largest of these procedural hurdles. The Military Voting Protection Act would give our troops a louder and clearer voice at the polls by ensuring their completed absentee ballots are delivered back home in time to be counted and do not get lost on the way. The bill would reduce delays in the absentee voting process by requiring the Department of Defense to take a more active role in the process; it would require the DoD to be responsible for collecting completed ballots from overseas troops and then express-shipping them back to the United States in time to be counted, allowing troops to track their ballots while they are in transit and confirm their delivery after they arrive at local election offices.

America was built on the values of democracy, fairness and freedom. It should outrage every American, as it does me, that our troops overseas are being denied one of our most scared civil rights. Meaningful reform will not come overnight, but now is the time to take up the cause of military voters to prevent their further disenfranchisement. So, this Memorial Day, as we remember those brave men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice, let's also hope that Congress will act to ensure that today's U.S. service members serving abroad, while they fight to defend our democracy, can also participate in its democratic process.

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