The Disenfranchised Military Voter

If this disenfranchisement happened to any minority section of the US population does anyone doubt there would be outrage?:

Overseas military voters had less than half of their votes counted in last year’s congressional elections, according to data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Monday.

“One thing is clear: At every level of government, we need to do a better job,” said Donetta Davidson, chair of the commission. “We must make sure all eligible voters are getting their opportunities.”

The figures, released at the commission’s annual conference on ways to improve and troubleshoot the absentee voting process, showed that only about 992,000 of the nearly 6 million eligible overseas citizens requested ballots for the 2006 general election.

That included about 119,000 military personnel stationed outside the United States. Of those, only about 57,000 — less than 48 percent — had their votes successfully cast or counted.

EAC officials said that’s roughly the same percentage that were counted for expatriates and domestic military filing absentee ballots. The major failures were on the ballot delivery side, with about 72 percent of those who failed to vote never receiving any of their requested election materials. [Stars & Stripes]

This is nothing new.  I blogged over two years ago about how Washington State was aledgedly intentionally disenfranchising military voters:

Washington state election officers and military officials say they have found no evidence of problems with overseas military absentee ballots, despite allegations that many may not have been delivered or counted.

“We’re seeing allegations made that large numbers of military voters did not get ballots, but we think that’s partisan rhetoric over a close election,” said Pam Floyd, assistant elections director for the state. “And we believe all military ballots signed by Washington voters and received were counted.”

But state Republicans believe that hundreds of overseas servicemembers never received their ballots, and that may have stolen the election from their gubernatorial candidate, Dino Rossi.

“We’re getting tons of calls and e-mails from troops overseas who didn’t receive their ballots, or who got them weeks after the election,” said Mary Lane, spokeswoman for Rossi. “We’re looking at a lot of disenfranchised military voters.”

Lane provided Stars and Stripes with complaints from 14 family members who have loved ones in the military, most deployed overseas, who did not receive absentee ballots. The Rossi campaign said it has heard from 260 voters who claim not to have received ballots, though not all of them are military.

Department of Justice officials would not comment on news reports that the federal government is investigating whether state elections officials broke the law by sending out the ballots too late. Republicans have filed suit to mandate a new election because of the military issues and other supposed voting irregularities.

In November, Rossi was named the winner of the general election by 261 votes and won a machine recount by 42, but a second, manual recount last month showed Democrat Christine Gregoire with a 129-vote margin of victory.

I was one of the people who complained because I am registered to vote in Washington State and never received an absentee ballot in 2004.  Rossi lost the election by 129 votes after a dubious recount and Washington State possibly intentionally did not send out military absentee ballots because they know the military votes overwhelmingly Republican. 

Here we go again two years later where we find the same problem in the 2006 Congressional elections.  Once could be an accident, but twice is a trend of disenfranchisement.  There was a number of close Congressional elections and it would be an interesting statistic to see by state the number of disenfranchised military voters.  So remember this the next time you hear someone say that they are a disenfranchised voter.  What sector of the US population besides the military has less than 48% of their votes count? 

I’m sure the ACLU will be all over this any day now.