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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Voters who have requested but not received their ballot by now can dispatch the FWAB in its place. (If the real ballot subsequently arrives, election officials are required to discard the FWAB and count the regular ballot.) A million hard copies of the FWAB have been sent to military bases in Germany and Asia and to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan -- two for every member of the military, Wright says -- who surely deserve them. But on the civilian side, the record is spottier. The State Department, charged with helping civilians overseas, ordered its consulates and embassies to stockpile the form. But Democrats Abroad reports that many have been caught short-handed and that direct voter requests to the FVAP have gone unfulfilled. In one pathetic twist, employees of DaimlerChrysler in Stuttgart had to beg forms from the military at the gate of the base last week, a voting officer said.
Because so much hangs on key states, and on the possibly widespread use of an untested, little-known ballot, the potential for disaster is enormous. "If this election is close, 2000 is going to look like a cakewalk," says Margo Miller, a London-based lawyer for AOK. "It's going to be so messy in so many places, the fact that the FWAB hasn't been easier to get is inexcusable."
The Pentagon responds that the two major parties began asking for the online FWAB only in late September and that it has moved "mountains of bureaucracy" to get the form online. Starting now, the tiny bureau of 14 civil servants in suburban Virginia will get the word out to election officials in 3,142 American counties that the downloaded version of the write-in ballot is good to go.
But the program's record does not inspire much confidence. Indeed, voters contacting officials to ask about the ballot have been shocked at the ignorance they've encountered. In Nepal, one embassy worker said the ballot could be mailed from the United States, which it cannot; in Chester County, Pa., an election supervisor had no idea what it was. Says Wright of the Military Voting Rights Project: "Nobody has ever heard of it. The FVAP does show up at meetings and presentations, but I bet a lot of the 5,000 election officials don't go to those meetings, judging from the very basic questions we get back."
While waiting for the FVAP to act, both parties gyrated over the Internet. AOK put up its own version online with the disclaimer that no one knew if such ballots would be accepted; Democrats Abroad and the two main registration Web sites did not. Republicans Abroad then snitched the AOK form, without the disclaimer, and put it on its site, only to shamefacedly pull it off when told that, until the FVAP formally approved it, nobody could use the darn thing. AOK finally sent out 25,000 hard copies at its own expense to voters from swing states who'd signed up on the Overseas Vote 2004 Web site.
The overarching problem is the scant resources allotted civilian voters, who outnumber the military overseas by at least 8 to 1. While all applaud the goal of making sure men and women fighting for our country can exercise their right to vote, civilians point out that they are Americans, too. And the FVAP has a history of favoring the military, not least because the Department of Defense has a captive, easily identified audience and far more money and muscle than the State Department. Citizens abroad are far harder to find than soldiers: Embassies have direct contact only with a small minority of those who have registered to be alerted and evacuated in case of a disaster -- though one might call mass disenfranchisement a disaster of another degree.
Highly publicized missteps this year have hardly restored faith in the FVAP. Civilian voters still have trouble getting through to the agency and are barred from the e-mail ballot-request and delivery Web site that is available to soldiers from ten states. More worryingly, a pilot e-mail voting system signed on to by Missouri, Utah and North Dakota, in which soldiers can e-mail ballots to a contractor that then faxes those ballots to local jurisdictions, is being operated by Omega Technologies, headed by a former Republican Party donor, according to the New York Times.
The Times also reports that earlier this week two Democratic members of Congress, Henry Waxman of California and Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the FVAP. Among their concerns is that the agency's online ballot-retrieval system is not open to most civilians abroad.
Miller, the AOK lawyer, says the FVAP, which moved only two years ago from the Pentagon department that buys soap and toilet paper into the personnel department, "is basically focused on the military and doesn't care." A Department of Defense insider involved in getting out the vote overseas puts it more harshly: "The senior military leadership will only admit they have a responsibility to help civilians get involved in elections if you force it down their throat. They're only interested in the soldiers."
The Pentagon denies these charges. As each misstep has occurred, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Charles Abell has defended the FVAP, saying it is making a heroic effort to reach all citizens overseas through voting workshops and toll-free telephone numbers. Indeed, all observers agree that the FVAP has gone to extraordinary lengths this year to get out the military vote. Still, Democrats suspect that in the case of the online ballot, it's no accident that the agency did not move faster: The measure mainly benefits civilians, many more of whom will support John Kerry than their counterparts in the military. Dzieduszycka-Suinat frets darkly that "higher up, someone is saying, 'Make sure there are problems.'" From the perspective of Wright, from the Military Voting Rights Project, political pressure is a given. "When Clinton was in charge, they tried to suppress the military vote for that very reason," he says. "I would not disagree," he says, that politics this year, too, plays a role.
