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Mark Duncan / AP
Stephen Doell stacks boxes of vote-by-mail ballots at the Cuyahoga County Board of elections in Cleveland, Friday, Nov. 4, 2011. Statewide ballot questions, including a politically charged collective-bargaining issue, have amped up off-year election early voting that ended Friday.
Since the 2000 recount in Florida, voting procedures have been under the microscope; in close races, painstaking legal details and arcane rules can determine the results.
Among those details is the handling of ballots cast by hundreds of thousands of “invisible” overseas voters. In the swing state of Virginia this November, 10,000 votes could decide the outcome in the presidential race, or the U.S. Senate race. In 2006, Democrat Jim Webb won Virginia’s Senate seat by a margin of 9,329 out of the nearly 2.4 million votes that were cast, a mere four-tenths of one percent margin of victory.
Related: As Fla. votes, Romney poised to regain frontrunner status
Likewise in 2008, in another battleground state, Missouri, Republican presidential candidate John McCain beat Democrat Barack Obama by 3,903 votes, a one-tenth of one percent margin.
Voters who are outside the country could provide the winning margin: Virginia had more than 29,000 overseas voters who cast ballots in 2008, while Missouri had about 13,000 – easily enough in each state to swing a close election.
All the more reason for Americans who are living or stationed abroad, those serving in the military, or working or studying in Israel, China, or elsewhere to vote -- and for their votes to be counted.
Even though U.S. troops have been withdrawn from Iraq, more than 1.4 million soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Air Force personnel are still serving overseas. Especially for Americans in uniform, stationed in far-flung places from Afghanistan to Okinawa, voting this November will require an extra effort. Here’s a guide to what the federal government and the states are doing to make it easier for them to vote.
How many American voters are there overseas?
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, about 682,000 votes were submitted for counting in 2008 by Americans living in foreign countries. In the 2010 midterm elections, that number fell to about 197,000.
The number of potential voters who may be living abroad on Election Day is difficult to gauge. The Census counts only people present inside the United States. The State Department has data on the number of Americans in each foreign country, but does not release that data.
But a new study sponsored by the Overseas Vote Foundation estimates that there are 523,000 Americans living in Mexico, nearly 200,000 in Canada, and about 163,000 in Israel, the top three countries for Americans living abroad.
What legal right do Americans living abroad have to vote?
A 1986 law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires that states allow U.S. civilians living abroad and active-duty uniformed military personnel and their family members to register and vote by absentee ballot in elections for federal offices.
A 2009 law, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, or MOVE Act, requires states to transmit absentee ballots to overseas voters no later than 45 days before a federal election.
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Hans von Spakovsky, an election law analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, complains that UOCAVA, unlike the 1965 Voting Rights Act, does not create a “private right of action” so that legal advocacy groups can’t help members of the military file lawsuits against states when they do not comply with the law.
The Justice Department did file lawsuits against four states and the territory of Guam for failing to send overseas ballots out in time for the 2010 elections.
The chief elections official in most states is the secretary of state, and several of them argue that they don’t have authority over – and shouldn’t be blamed for the shortcomings of -- county elections officials who are the ones with the responsibility of sending out absentee ballots.
For an American business executive working overseas, in which state is his or her vote counted?
The voter sends his ballot to the last jurisdiction in which he resided and was a registered voter. So the businessman who’d lived in and registered to vote in Allentown, Pa. and is now working in Germany, will send his ballot back to Allentown.
What about 21-year old soldier from a town in Colorado who joined the Army right after high school and who is now stationed in Afghanistan and wants to register and vote?
He’d be eligible to register and vote in the place where he lived before he entered active duty, which is most likely his parents’ residence just before he entered the military, unless he had changed his state of residence after that point.
He can use The Federal Post Card Application to register and to request an absentee ballot. The Federal Post Card Application is available at the Federal Voting Assistance Program web site, www.fvap.gov.
Which states have the largest number of military and overseas voters?
In 2008, nearly half of all of ballots sent to overseas voters were sent from five states: Florida, California, Texas, New York and Washington.
What’s the biggest reason that men and women serving abroad in the military do not vote?
Nearly 30 percent of military voters overseas are not receiving their ballots in time to fill out the ballot and send it back to their state by Election Day, said Candace Wheeler, the deputy director of government relations for the National Military Family Association, who spoke at a conference Friday in Washington sponsored by the Overseas Vote Foundation.
Due to the frequent changes of location and the unpredictability of military life, “it’s not that they may not want to vote, it’s not always easy to vote,” she said.
Even if the election official in the city or town where the soldier is registered conscientiously sends him an absentee ballot, it may not catch up with him if he has deployed from one place to another.
And it may be diff for a deployed soldier or Marine to send the ballot back to his hometown in time for it to be counted. Michigan, for example, requires the paper ballot to be at the local precinct by 8pm on Election Day. “That’s really where it becomes problematic,” said Jocelyn Benson, a law professor at Wayne State University and founder of Military Spouses of Michigan. Other states such as Florida will count the absentee ballot if it is postmarked by Election Day.
Tom Tarantino, a former Army captain who served in Iraq and manages legislative relations for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the federal government and the states had done a better job in recent years in getting ballots to military personnel overseas. But he said, “One of the things we haven’t quite figured out yet is: is low voter turnout (among military personnel overseas) because of the structural problems to access (to voting)… or is it because of apathy?”
Tarantino said even when a soldier is at a base in the United States, registering to vote and voting is often not his highest priority. If “I’m a 21-year old E-4, I’m worried about training myself so I don’t get myself killed next time I go overseas,” he said. Voting won’t likely be top priority for such a soldier, Tarantino said.
What are the states and the federal government doing to make it easier for overseas voters to cast their ballots?
Bob Carey, the director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, said, “When it takes 20 or 30 days to get a ballot overseas to a military person at a forward operating base or a combat outpost; we want to reduce that to 20 or 30 milliseconds.”
His agency’s website, FVAP.gov, provides a quick way to help overseas Americans register and vote. “We’re trying to take the entire process and make it seamless, quick intuitive and easy,” Carey said.
The Federal Voting Assistance Program also is giving out $20 million in grant money to states to facilitate on-line ballot delivery to military personnel abroad. New Jersey, for example, is using some of its $800,000 in federal money to help its county boards of elections automatically process ballots from overseas voters that are e-mailed back in a PDF file.
Paper military ballots being mailed back to the United States are treated as express mail which is the highest level of service.
Some states have websites that allow overseas voters to check if their ballot was received and counted. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted says that at his state’s Ohio Military Votes web site “we give them a tracking number so that they can follow their actual envelope and their ballot back to their Board of Elections to ensure that they receive it and it was counted.”
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this has got to be where the cheating gets started.
YEP. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck, then it has to be a duck. I can see cheating written all over this.
Yeah, all of those soldiers and their families can't wait to cheat on their ballots......huh???? Actually, most of the cheating involves not getting the ballots to the military folks on time; because everyone knows they are overwhelmingly conservative, that would cast the shadow of guilt right towards the DNC headquarters.
No,this is where they;"Misplace" our military ballots....or just not get them to us in time for them to count.......just like they did in 2008...........U.S.Army Disabled Veteran
Just wonderin - did you find out who "they" are?
"Invisible Overseas Voters" ---- I knew something was amuck !!! Wonder how many of those "invisible voters" are real people, and alive people? I can see Acorn buying airline tickets outta the states right now. Gotta register those "invisable voters"
Weeeeeee!
and the inmates....and the dead people...
The premise that overseas voters can change the outcome is invalid. Just because one candidate beat another by 4,000 votes doesn't mean that the overseas ballots of 4000 and 1 would all go the defeated candidate. Come on MSNBC. If the general population of a state is divided 60/40 for a candidate, isn't is more likely that the overseas votes would follow the same distribution?
No, because military voters tend to vote conservative, not follow their home state trend. That skews the results in favor of Republican candidates, which is why the Democrats would prefer for the overseas votes to just quietly disappear, by whatever means they can devise.
According to Ron Paul they will vote overwhelmingly for him.
As one of those "Invisible Overseas Voters" I can only hope the "cheating" that has been mentioned is no more than in the states.
But, it gives me the chance to cast my vote. And since the US is the only country in the world that taxes its citizens while living and earning outside the US, then heck yes, I'm going to vote. All of us overseas should.
However, the 70% drop in votes from 2008 to the 2010 mid-terms seems a little drastic...
Newt Gingrich Robocall: Mitt Romney Caused Holocaust!!
It was nice to vote today for a man who actually made government work on a balanced budget.
If Newt is a pig, your man Obama is a 1000lb hog!
If DC hates the man, he has to be good for the rest of us.
Funny how you give the credit to Newt the Brute instead of the Democratic President that increased taxes and balanced the budget ..But I realize fairness is not a conservative value
Okay, Obama is $1000lb hog compared to Clinton also. Are you happy?
I will even give you that Clinton was a pretty good President and Bush sucked, happier?
Obama is ten times worse than Bush.
Newt balanced the budget. Clinton signed it into law.
Yes....typical ignorant lefty party-line spin...
Like it or not... It will be Obama. The political clowns belong to the corporations of the United Global States of America and don't serve we the people.
If you want Newt to win my friend you might be living with no clothes in less you're getting corporate tax cuts hahahahaha!
People with get what they god damned well deserve..it they are crazy enough to vote for the same clowns that gave us a near repeat of the Great Depression and crazy enough to vote for the same policies that nearly crashed us..well then they can live with the obvious consequences of doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome..
What else can you expect from a party that thinks the worse someone can say about you is "your an intellectual!"
Keep in mind that OUR military culture is strongly anti-politics at the lower levels so despite the lip service about voting, it seems like a contradiction to the average junior enlisted personnel. If THEY wanted high participation, they'd form up and march to the polls just like everything else when the military wants "high participation." As it is, good luck even finding your voting officer.
FYI-
It is a little hard to vote when the ballots don't go out on time or at all - like the Illinois and Nevada ballots in 2010.
Hey peanut gallery; you sound alot like our never-served politicians......Kinda hard to 'march to the polls' if we're in the sandbox.......and if you 'line up' enough troops in A-stan,...you usually get a bunch of dead troops..........We get our voting forms whenever they get them to us.....before,during,or even AFTER an election....and a good 95% take voting seriously....We don't get to spend our time in fort livingroom waiting to go vote.....and by the way,..it's not all young-junior-enlisted over seas......some of us NCO's are a little older....I was deployed at 45,48,and 50 yrs old.......a guard unit aviation BN. had several guys in 60 in theater.................U.S.Army Disabled Veteran
And remember, all you soldiers and Marines serving around the globe, if it's a really, really tight election, the Democrats will try to get your absentee ballots thrown out so they can win like Gore tried in 2000 in Florida. Tsk tsk, too much lean toward Republicans in your choices.
Gore????? You mean Jeb don't you.
Jeb likes to throw out votes people cast for him? When did this start? The military votes majority Republican, it's in every poll ever taken on the issue.
I thought those hanging chads determined who won in Flordia, along with the SCOTUS who made the final decision.
we can NOT have 4 more years of what Odumba has been doing/not doing. while he has a good "message" to the people, he has no clue on what to do or how to do it. If his biggest accomplishment was the order to kill Bin L............then we are in deep trouble. even Odumba is seeing that his healthcare reform is not what he thought it was and can now see the damage it's starting to cause..........4 more years of "hope" and promises..............no thanks.............he didn't keep them the 1st time around
Soooooo, This answers a big question. The Question was, " How will the GOP keep the vote close enough to toss it to the supreme court?" Their boys alito, roberts and friends can't have a 5-4 vote for the gop unless the election can be tossed to them. We knew about the Diebolt voting machines, citizens united, the desperate attempt to redistrict in many States, the racist policy in south dakota, the voter ID trick, and now .....Absentee voters. Perfect.
As stalin said, he who casts the vote is nothing, the one who counts the votes is everything. (Not a verbatim quote) Where did those eight ballot forms go in Iowa?
No evidence Diebold machines are rigged. There were a few errors in 2004, including one machine that gave 4000 votes to Bush wrongly, but it was corrected, which had no bearing on the outcome in that state Ohio, in which Bush won by a more than 150,000 vote margin.
Democrats are more crooked than Republicans on redistricting, go look at the State of Massachusetts House district map, it looks like something coughed up during a bad bout with bronchitis. Both parties do it, and it should be stopped, but there will be little change in the House majority numbers because of it in 2012. In Illinois the Democrats drew up a new crooked map to steal House seats from the Republicans, and it's doubtful the new districts post-Census will nationwide gain the Reps more than 3 or 4 seats max.
There is no racist policy in S. Dakota.
"The voter ID trick" lololololol more accurately The voter ID laws that stop the Democrat voter fraud trick. There's only 1 reason any person in the US would be against showing ID to vote: you support voter fraud and you want people (Democrats) to be able to impersonate someone on the voter rolls who isn't voting and vote for them illegally. "But wait, the poor don't have enough money for ID"...they spend more than that on fast food in a month, if not a week.
Michael, your fellow leftist Stalin summed up many Democratic precincts very well. The problem is, Democrats have no basic morals, the only thing they believe in is redistributing wealth from those who have to those who don't have, and anything goes in support of that.
Chesty, guess that depends on your view of ID. Lets see, the state/local election board issues voter ID cards. Go to the voting both, and that voter ID card, that they issued, is not enough proof? BS, it should be. How many people in NYC have no drivers license, as they don't need a vehicle to get around in?
How about people confined to a wheel chair, that cannot get around real good, can't drive, can't get their state issued ID card as there is no place close by they can get to. Guess what Chesty, last I heard, they were still American's, with the RIGHT TO VOTE. It's just that you don't want them to vote, as it is a proven fact that the more people that vote, the GOP loses. Ever wonder why that is? And no, it's not election fraud.
And how many people in the last twenty years have been charged and convicted of voter fraud. Research the numbers, then come back here spouting your manure, without lying about it, if you can. Your problem is you won't be able to. Those pesky FACTS will be in your way.
I used to conscientiously vote every year when I was living overseas. Then I found out that they don't open the ballots unless the vote is very tight. It really bothered me that I went to all the trouble to get a ballot, vote and mail it in, only to have it sit unopened on a shelf somewhere.....
May the Best person who can lead the USA from its current situation Win. The USA must be made a great economic power and lead the World. Consider these few points. The plans and Games of India. Indians want to make human lobbies all across the world. Indians are going in huge numbers to the USA and EUROPE even when there is Recession. Indians also plan to go to Africa, Latin America and Canada,Australia, New Zealand in huge numbers. ie. Indians want to go to the countries of the Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians. Muslim countries do not give citizenship or immigration permanently to Indians. Now it is official that the Indian government will be actively helping Indian companies both public and private to acquire companies and assets abroad. It is quite possible that the Indians keep a track of the labour market in Western countries and send Indians in huge numbers to western countries. ie. the countries of the catholics, protestants and orthodox christians. Thus in the guise of supplying labour to the western countries Indians will take permanent immigration in the western countries and build up sizeable human lobbies. So than in case Indians act smart with the western nations at a Later Stage then these Indian human lobbies in western countries can put pressure on the western countries. GOD BLESS THE USA.
Kevin Valentine Moraes
Mira Road (Thane)
Invisible overseas voters= dead people that vote every election in Texas
The people that founded this country
will NOT let something like an election
destroy what they have built since 1776
Sleep tight
you are in good hands
they have all the power
but vote
if you like pi--ing against the wind
farting in a submarine
are some other useful pursuit in life
Yes, they do seem to be laying the ground work for a "margin" that can used as "plausible deniability" when the election is thrown. Representational democracy is so 18th century. LOL
None are citizens but the Obama administration is unconcerned assuring Federal Election officials that all ballots would be appropriately pre-marked before not mailing them.
nibor, and just how do you come up with this BS that none of them are citizens? There are hundreds of thousands of American citizens living in Mexico, Canada and other places. What gives you the right to say they are not citizens?? Jerk!!
There are many thousands of U.S citizens on Social security and military retirement
Living in Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, and other countries in Central and South America.
Those that know how to add and subtract can see that they can live a very good life there.
Medical treatment is inexpensive and good. Do not need Medicare and it does not pay there anyway.
If you are a decent human being they will let you live there quite peacfully.
If u r a replican t-bag trash racist they will end your miserable life for u.
And yes they get to vote in the U.S. They have earned a decent retirement which they can not afford in U.S.
What's a replican?
The Dems don't like overseas voters for the same reason they don't like overseas Americans in general: They tend to skew to the conservative side. In the 2000 census, Utah was denied another congressional seat because the Census Bureau refused to count some 10-15 thousand Mormon missionaries serving abroad as residents of Utah. This sort of shenanigan goes on all the time, with redistricting, gerrymandering, and overseas votes not counted. "Make every vote count" (Two or three times, if you're a Democrat).
Yeah... Wasn't it in the 08 election that the Democrats were busing homeless people in, using dead peoples' names, etc? Not that I have anything against homeless people, mind you. I help out where I can.
Not us. The system requires more speed than our mail service gives time for. Anyhow, why bother choosing between the ineffective (Obama) and the incorrect (the GOP candidate)? What's more:
1. Our ballot would be an MA ballot, and the Democrat always wins.
2. We won't vote for anyone who supports same-sex marriage. If we vote at all the Dem party in MA may think we weren't serious when we let them know that.
I think they forgot to mention the 100 000 of americans that live in France. what about those living in european countries ??
Wow.... over a million military personnal living over seas ???? And your taxes pay all these people ??? No wonder your treasury is empty !! Now you wonder why you still have not universal health care and free college education ! Your governments especially the right wing has got their priority totally wrong ! Your tax dollars should be used for good safety nets for all !
I think the military will vote Republican, most do NOT like Obama. A friend of mine that has a son over there said pulling out the troops from Iraq has left the ones there in danger of being killed. Seen on the news 190 civilians have been killed by the radicals since the troops pulled out. If we had jobs here the civilian Americans wouldn't have to go overseas to work. Obama has spent billions on failed green energy projects that the taxpayers are paying for. Created more debt than any other president in history. $118 MIllion wasted- Ener 1 going bust at the taxpayers expense, 500 million on Solyndra-gone!, Sun Power $1.2 BILLION of our money-Gone!! Seen 110 Million in back taxes owed from people on Capital Hill-haven't paid their taxes
Morally challenged democrats will do their level best to try and keep the military votes from counting. They know the military regards them as lily-livered pukes and 99% of them vote for Republican candidates. The dems will sidetrack the military votes if they can and instead focus on getting every illegal immigrant registered by offering them a free carton of cigarettes each time they vote. Remember the democrats motto, "Vote early and often." I think there is a big housecleaning coming and a lot of hysterical liberal democrats are going to be on the outside looking in - bout time! Get them out before they ruin our country. Sluice out the scumbags!