Denying Our Soldiers The Vote
Posted 06:38 PM ET
Election '10: The Department of Justice is failing to enforce a law that protects the voting rights of soldiers overseas. They're allowed to fight and die for their country, but they can't vote for its leaders?
Last Saturday was the deadline under the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE) for states to have sent unmarked absentee ballots to soldiers overseas so they can exercise the same right to vote as those they risk their lives to protect, including Afghans and Iraqis.
The MOVE Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support last year, says states must provide overseas ballots 45 days before a federal election. Waivers can be granted under certain circumstances, but only if states can prove the votes of service members can still be cast and counted.
Five states — Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Washington — were granted waivers. Other states have indicated they were having difficulty complying, though it's hard to fathom what prevents them from ensuring service members from their states can vote.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who co-authored the law, says that despite repeated inquiries, DOJ has provided no substantive information on the level of compliance or how Justice intends to enforce the MOVE Act.
"This law represents the most meaningful reform in this area in decades, but it is not going to enforce itself," Cornyn wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
"Full compliance by the states depends on the DOJ making it a priority. The disenfranchisement of military voters must come to an end. If it is allowed to continue, it will represent a shameful failure to honor the heroic service of those who defend America."
Imagine the uproar and activity at DOJ if a Southern state failed to provide enough ballots to its rural minority communities. Yet DOJ has been strangely silent on the issue of the right and ability of military voters to cast their ballots.
Perhaps this administration's reluctance to guarantee the voting rights of soldiers is due to the fact that the military leans further to the right politically than the general voting public.
An April 8-11 Gallup poll found Americans overall were 26% Republican, 29% Democratic and 42% independent. A survey of 1,800 active duty troops in the April 11 Military Times discovered that GIs were 41% Republican, 29% Democrat and 32% independent.
In close elections, as many races promise to be in this turbulent year, military votes could make the difference. An estimated 17,000 military voters were disenfranchised by missed deadlines and administrative glitches in 2008. Such votes could have changed the results of the Minnesota race that made comedian Al Franken a U.S. senator. Maybe that's the whole idea.
In the 2000 Bush-Gore recount battle, Team Gore tried to disenfranchise soldiers, sailors and airmen willing to die for our right to vote because it was likely such votes would be more likely Republican.
In Bill Sammon's blockbuster book, "At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election," it was revealed how Mark Herron, who said he was retained by the DNC on election night to help shepherd Democratic presidential election lawsuits through the local courts, sent a five-page letter to Democratic attorneys throughout Florida giving them tips on how to lodge protests against military ballots.
We are reminded of a young Navy lieutenant in 2000 whose ballot was tossed because he wrote on the envelope he could not get a postmark on his ship before sending it to Florida, which the 1986 "Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act" said he did not need.
A sailor on an aircraft carrier or a GI sitting in a tank somewhere does not have the luxury of walking to the nearest mailbox or driving to the nearest post office. For some of these young men and women it is their first vote. For some, God forbid, it may be their last as well.
Shame on the Department Of Justice. Shame. |
