Obama Administration Disenfranchising Troops?

WorldNetDaily has a story up today about the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act of 2009. In making its findings with respect to this law, Congress stated that the “local, State, and Federal Government entities involved with getting ballots to military and overseas voters must work in conjunction to provide voter registration services and balloting materials in a secure and expeditious manner.”

It mandates that states create procedures for absentee military voters to request and states to provide “by mail or electronically voter registration applications and absentee ballot applications with respect to general, special, primary, and runoff elections for Federal office.” The law does not mandate any special provisions for state elections. It mandates that absentee voters and deployed military personnel receive their ballots no later than 45 days prior to an election.

Unfortunately, Obama’s Justice Department doesn’t care. Incumbents – of which, the majority are Democrats – are facing a tough election year in which members of every party are at risk of losing their seats. Knowing that the majority of military personnel are conservatives, it doesn’t strike me as odd that Eric Holder wants to disenfranchise military voters. Had Minnesota’s military vote been counted, the election of Stuart Smalley may not have occurred.

In an opinion piece written for the Washington Times, M. Eric Eversole – director of the Military Voter Protection (MVP) Project and a former litigation attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice – tells all about how the Department of Justice is screwing troops:

Before the 2008 election, at least 10 states and the District of Columbia provided military voters with just 35 days or fewer to receive and return their ballots. Overall, the Pew Center on the States found that “more than a third of states [did] not provide military voters stationed abroad with enough time to vote or [were] at high risk of not providing enough time.”

Yet the primary entity responsible for protecting military voters, the Voting Section, decided not to pursue those states even though federal law (i.e., the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) gave the section wide latitude to protect military voters. The law merely requires proof that the state did not provide a military member with a reasonable opportunity, including sufficient time, to vote by absentee ballot. Given the overwhelming evidence on mail delivery times, these cases could have and should have been brought.

There is no doubt that the Voting Section’s decision disenfranchised thousands of military members. According to the Election Assistance Commission, more than 17,000 military and overseas voters were disenfranchised in 2008 because their ballots arrived after the deadline and had to be rejected. Thousands more were disenfranchised when their ballots never arrived or were received too close to the election to be returned.

Read the entire piece here. Perhaps, a letter writing campaign to our Congressmen and women is in order as we face one of the most important elections in the history of our lives.