States want better Military Absentee Voting Procedures

State election officials, working with members of the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns, vowed today to push for reform of voting procedures, especially for Military members abroad who have problems registering to vote, getting absentee ballots and returning completed ballots to be counted.

At a voting conference held in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Pew Center on the States, state election officials and people studying voting problems recommended easing registration rules to make the voting process almost automatic, expand opportunities for people to vote in person or by absentee ballot before Election Day, and come up with a better way of allowing military people to vote.

“There was a consensus that the system for military is broken and that long-term and sustained improvements are needed,” according to a statement issued by the Pew Center.

“Our history of trying to fix military voting is one of the classic examples of Band-Aid upon Band-Aid upon Band-Aid,” said Oregon State Election Director John Lindback. “We need to change the system so these voters have a fighting chance of getting their ballots back on time.”

Fewer problems with military ballots were reported during the November general elections than after the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Still, not everything went smoothly. Virginia, for example, had problems with some military ballots because the forms used by service members did not ask witnesses to provide their address, as required by state law.

Several close races that involved recounts — including the still undecided Senate contest in Minnesota — showed the value of ensuring every vote is counted.

The outcome of the Minnesota race does not appear to rest on absentee ballots from service members, however, but rather on whether and how to count ballots on which both candidates received a vote, leaving the voter’s intention unclear.

Congress had been working on military voter reform legislation before the November election, but lawmakers were unable to agree on details, so no final measure was approved.

One widely favored idea is for the military to rely less on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver completed ballots from troops who are overseas, and instead have the ballots collected by commands and turned over to private shipping companies for delivery directly to election officials. While this could be faster, there are some concerns about the idea of having military officials sort and handle ballots.

Experiments with having troops vote via the Internet instead of by paper ballots have been limited, largely because of concerns about the security of electronic voting systems.

It is unclear whether concerns about hackers altering votes can ever be completely resolved, but congressional aides believe it might be possible to have service members vote using secure military computer networks that would provide online voting for military personnel only.