http://www.washingtonguardian.com/ballot-buck-passing
Pentagon fails to
comply with law to help overseas soldiers vote, watchdog says
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The military
services haven't created offices on all overseas bases to help soldiers cast
their ballots, citing money shortages
UPDATED 23:53 PM EDT,
SEPTEMBER 4, 2012 | BY JOHN
SOLOMON
Why It Matters:
Congress required
the Pentagon to create voting assistance offices on all overseas military bases
to help deployed soldiers cast their ballots back in their home states, but
military branches haven't fully complied, citing budget shortages and a
difference of opinion with lawmakers.
With another
election lurking around the corner, the Pentagon is getting a bad review for
its efforts to comply with a new law designed to make it easier for overseas
military personnel to cast their ballots.
The Military and
Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act was passed by Congress in 2009 and signed
into law by President Barack Obama and was supposed to make it easier for both
soldiers deployed overseas and U.S. citizens living abroad to cast ballots back
in their home states.
One of the key
provisions required each military branch to create an installation voting
assistance office (IVAO) for every military base outside an immediate combat
zone.
But the Pentagon’s
inspector general, the military’s internal watchdog, reported Tuesday it got a
disappointing result when it tried to locate such voting assistance offices on
each installation earlier this year.
“Results were
clear. Our attempts to contact IVAOs failed about 50 percent of the time,” the
inspector general reported. “We concluded the Services had not established all
the IVAOs as intended by the MOVE Act because, among other issues, the funding
was not available.”
The Pentagon
estimates it could cost $15 million to $20 million a year to create all the offices
required by the law.
In addition,
Pentagon officials apparently disagree with the tactics the law recommended,
preferring to use advertising and digital outreach efforts to educae overseas
soldiers rather than creating the voting assistance offices.
“DoD officials also
posed concerns about IVAO effectiveness,” the inspector general reported. “They
noted that younger military personnel were the biggest DoD military population
segment and emphasized that IVAOs were likely not the most cost effective way
to reach out to them given their familiarity and general preference for
communicating via on-line social media and obtaining information frominternet
websites.
“They suggested
assistance might be provided more effectively and efficiently by targeted
advertising,” the report noted.
The inspector
general recommended the Pentagon create better survey capabilities to identify
the voting needs of soldiers after the 2012 election and to work with Congress
to change the parts of the law that it isn’t complying with.
Pentagon officials
said they agreed with both recommendations.
You can read the
full report here.
1 comment:
It is also up to the individual States to send the absentee ballot to the individual military personnel. On top of that, MOST of the commands overseas bring in highly partisan Fox News as the ONLY news service aside from Stars and Stripes, available for the military personnel. When I was in the military myself, I saw a huge preponderance of Republican party individuals in positions of command, at nearly all levels, and they pushed their ideology very hard, that along with evangelical Christianity, and those who did not comply most often got extremely bad evaluation numbers on their annual evals. So those who did not espouse their brand of evangelicalism not toe the Repub line usually did not last long in the military, either they got booted out because of low eval scores or left because they could not stand the atmosphere of rigid right wing ideology and evangelism. The last thing we need is to have our military people being stood over by their superiors while they are casting their votes and telling them who to vote for, and if they do not vote the 'right way' getting low scores which get them removed from the military. I have seen this in action, and it is a sad, deplorable commentary on what actually goes on in our Military Establishments.
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