(US) 9/07 - Less than 1/2 of military...

Author Message   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 6692 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 2 (A keeper?) Posted on Friday, September 28, 2007 - 8:52 am:        (From BBV admin): Always take the Election Assistance Commission stuff with a grain of salt. This entity has a stated interest in high-technology elections. That can be read between the lines in this article, which accompanies reporting about electronic voting systems with the meaningless "people liked it, people were satisfied" while saying nothing about the fact that it often removes privacy and is subject to error and manipulation. The information is troubling, and not surprisingly, states that the biggest problem was failure to deliver voting materials -- which makes me wonder: Is it going to be any easier to deliver an electronic voting system to remote locations in the heat of battle? Stars & Stripes Mideast edition - Sept. 25, 2007, By Leo Shane III Less than half of military votes overseas counted Election commission: 57,000 ballots were cast in '06 WASHINGTON — 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. Still, the commission also saw positive news for overseas military. In a survey of absentee voters from four states — South Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Montana — researchers found that overseas military were nearly three times as likely to attempt to vote as their overseas civilian counterparts. And nearly 90 percent of those who made it through the system were pleased how the voting process worked. Q2 Data & Research senior partner Bruce Cain, who led the work on that survey, said overseas voters also are anxious to embrace new technology to make the absentee voting system easier to follow and more efficient. Currently only eight states allow transmitting a final election ballot, but others offer varying levels of e-mail assistance and fax submission offerings. "The numbers of [electronic voting options] are still small, but the satisfaction level with them is very high," he said. And EAC officials said local election officials they surveyed said they're anxious to offer more assistance to overseas voters, especially military serving in combat zones. Still, often those goals are constrained by the small budgets and small staff of the offices involved. Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, said 1,778 local election offices nationwide serve less than 1,000 voters, and often face more difficulty quickly responding to overseas requests.   Kathleen Wynne Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Kathleen_wynne Post Number: 235 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 3 (A keeper?) Posted on Friday, September 28, 2007 - 9:08 am:        Bev, Another point of interest is that the former Vice Chair of the EAC, Ray Martinez, is now the Executive Board Chair of the Overseas Vote Foundation. Mr. Martinez is also the principal and owner of the Martinez Consulting Group, a firm specializing in government relations, public affairs and policy implementation for an array of public and private sector clients. As a result of his prior experience with the EAC, he is still called upon often by members of Congress for his advice regarding election-related issues. The Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF) was founded in 2005 to assist uniformed and overseas American citizens in registering to vote in federal elections, starting with the November 7th 2006 General Election. The corporation is registered in Delaware. Mr. Martinez stated in a videotaped interview I had with him recently that he is against having any paper record in our elections. If he has his way, all voting machines will be paperless, thus making it impossible for citizens and/or political candidates to check independently of the machine's records whether votes had been counted or not, much less, whether they were counted accurately. A total takeover of our elections by the machines. Citizens need not apply. Kathleen   V. Kurt Bellman Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Formerelecdir Post Number: 1418 Registered: 04-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, September 29, 2007 - 8:01 am:        Bev, I have read the entire EAC report on UOCAVA voting. One thing is clear. The provision in HAVA that mandated that any UOCAVA voter's absentee ballot request constitutes an automatic absentee ballot request through the next two federal elections (and all in between) is causing a MASSIVE amount of the "uncounted ballot" statistics. Think of this. A soldier, let's call him Sgt. David Smith, applied for and got an absentee ballot in 2004 when he was stationed in Afghanistan, let's say. The law says he must be sent a ballot AT THAT SAME ADDRESS through the next two federal elections, or in other words, every Primary, (runoff, too, if the state has them), and November election through November 2008. Now I ask you. What is the likelihood that Sgt. David Smith is at the same military address from 2004 through 2008? It's ludicrous, yet sending a ballot every time is required by HAVA. Just dumb law. There is no system for the military to notify the soldier's home county's registrar's office of his change of military address. So each election, election jurisdictions mail out literally THOUSANDS of paper absentee ballots to addresses that are almost certainly stale.   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 6722 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, September 29, 2007 - 3:38 pm:        Good lord. Kurt, what you just pointed out is one of those idiot combinations of wasting money and messing up a fundmental public service that only the government seems to have really perfected. But let's think about this: I'm sure the study commissioned on this was also a pricey piece of work. How did Q2 Data & Research miss this cause? Because now that you've pointed it out, it's obvious that the result of such a procedures will be having a huge number of uncounted ballots. And also -- does this system, of sending the ballot to the old address of the military personnel, manage to disenfranchise them? Might their ballots be voted by someone else, or used for fraud?   V. Kurt Bellman Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Formerelecdir Post Number: 1422 Registered: 04-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007 - 7:16 am:        Bev, Actually, it's in there, it's just not featured or highlighted. It's in their discussion of "undeliverables".   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 6730 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 2 (A keeper?) Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007 - 3:17 pm:        Thank you for pointing that out. I missed it.

All original content on this website is Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by Black Box Voting. All rights reserved.
Forums powered by Discus Professional - www.discusware.com.
Original site and logo design is by Andy Markley - art101.com.