Members of the armed services can visit a Pizza Hut on base in Iraq, but the Pentagon has failed to comply with a 2009 law requiring voter registration offices on every military installation.A new report on military voting shows declining participation rates in the 2010 election despite an attempted congressional fix. Obama administration incompetence implementing the law is to blame.
Because service members have voted at historically low rates, Congress passed the MOVE Act in 2009. MOVE was supposed to cure impediments to voting by mandating absentee ballots mail overseas at least 45 days before election day. MOVE also required every military installation to have a voter registration office.
Sadly, a new report shows the problem has only grown worse, no thanks to a lackadaisical Justice Department and a Pentagon with misplaced priorities.
The report by the Military Voter Protection Project and Chapman University’s AMVET’s clinic concludes that participation rates by uniformed service members actually declined in the 2010 election, despite the MOVE Act.
Data collected by congressional mandate reveal that only 4.6 percent of eligible military voters cast an absentee ballot that counted. In 2006, it was 5.5 percent. These numbers came despite the MOVE mandate of a voter registration office on every military installation before the November 2010 election.
Yet Defense Department political appointees waited until three weeks after the 2010 election to issue the order to establish the offices. Now six months before the start of presidential primaries, a quarter of military installations remain noncompliant with the legal obligation to have functioning voter registration offices.
Contrast the Pentagon slow-walk on military voting with the blitz to integrate gays into the armed services. No resource limitation interfered with forcing every member of the armed services to sit through hours of sensitivity training.
Perhaps too busy acclimating warriors to the new gay policy, the Pentagon bureaucracy continues to resist voter registration offices, particularly for Marine installations.
Helping service members vote isn’t a priority of the Obama administration, especially before 2012. Even the Pentagon unit tasked with helping service members to vote (FVAP) is targeted for a 30 percent budget slash.
Tomorrow, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., will hold a hearing to determine what went wrong at DOD in 2010. The inept enforcement efforts at Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department also merit scrutiny.
Helping felons restore their right to vote is a priority at the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Unfortunately, the infamous division also enforces the MOVE Act. It took DOJ an embarrassing nine months after MOVE passed to update its webpage with the new standards.
Until July 2010, DOJ actually publicized the weaker protections of the pre-MOVE law. The responsible bureaucrat allowed a memo seeking approval for website changes to gather dust for months.
At DOJ, encouraging felons to vote is more important than helping a Marine understand her new rights. DOJ ineptitude didn’t end with a stale webpage. In February 2010, the same unhurried official told a convention of state election officials that litigation to enforce MOVE wasn’t a priority of the Justice Department.
Many states then failed to amend laws inconsistent with MOVE. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a MOVE sponsor, demanded throughout 2010 that DOJ report which states were not complying with the law. He never got that report. In fact, the responsible bureaucrat was praised and promoted.
When ballots didn’t mail 45 days before the 2010 election, the DOJ resembled the Keystone Kops. New York and Illinois, among others, ignored MOVE, while assuring DOJ they complied.
Lawsuits were filed only after media reports awakened a slumbering DOJ. Tragically, in both states, the DOJ allowed absentee ballots to mail 25 days or less before the election. This meant some ballots arrived in-theater after the election was already over.
Congress has much to fix and little time to fix it before the 2012 election. Giving troops the right to sue to get a ballot instead of relying on the Obama administration might be a good place to start.
J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.
The real felons are living in the WH and make up the faux administration. The fact it is now open knowledge that Democrats are professionals at committing voter fraud in may ways, George Soros manning his corrupt, Socialist minded people as Secretary of State in as many states as he can get them into, to sway elections to Democrat favor….yet our military is literaly being denied the right to vote pretty much. How much more BS and CRIME needs to come from this adminstration before ONE CONGRESSIONAL MEMBER MAKES ENOUGH NOISE THAT THEY SHOULD BE IMPEACHED OR FORCED TO RESIGN? It is nothing short of criminal insanity what is being done to our US military by the Communists in office but to deny them their right to vote is the epitome of misrepresentation of sub-human substance excused as human beings.
Obama has made it very clear that he has no regard for our military. Once saying that, why would he even want them to vote? Surely they would not vote for him & his administration, unless they have actually been living in a cave and not hearing the rhetoric at home.
The time to move on this is right now. I’m sure ACORN and all the other thugs will be available to {mis}count votes once again with the hopes of keeping the Muslim in the White house.
We who demand change, must start spreading the word that our military be allowed to vote in this election. Who should we contact to get this idea going? Is it MOVE? Or should it be attorney’s?
This administration comes straight from hell. Are there ANY Democrats with morals, values or love of country? The answer is: No. Or they would not be running Barak Hussein Obama again, and trumpeting their fundraising goals and achievements, as they continue to push America’s demise.
This admin isn’t working on the borders, this to push the NWO agenda, they are releasing terrorists and imprisoning our solders, they give financial aid to the enemy, they attack Israel, they fund abortions, push the homosexual agenda, the list is endless…God help us.
Oh His Grace, I believe there are, but they are locked in a 60′s time warp and for the most part rarely if ever have challenged their assumptions. Thanks for the comment, J.C.
No God Help him, God trumps Allah, he will burn in hell one a Muslim always a Muslim.