Playing Fast and Loose With Military Ballots
This is going on both in Illinois and New York: The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the state of Illinois missed the deadline for mailing absentee ballots to members of the military and other overseas American voters as part of a new federal overseas voting law. Cris Cray, Director of Legislation at the Illinois State Board of Elections, says not all of Illinois’ 110 jurisdictions were compliant with the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE). The law requires every state to mail their absentee ballots 45 days prior to Election Day to overseas troops, government employees and other Americans who want to vote from abroad. Cray says she is currently compiling data from each of Illinois’ jurisdictions to determine which were compliant and which were delinquent. Cray said it’s possible the ballots may not be counted because the state was tardy in sending them out. Of course, military ballots tend to lean pretty far to the right. They would be fairly reliable votes for GOP candidates, but if they can manage to keep them from counting, Democrats will benefit. This reminds me of the 2000 Florida recount when Al Gore’s lawyers went to court and managed to get thousands of military ballots thrown out because they didn’t have a postmark on them, something that isn’t required for military mail coming from ships and posts overseas. It probably cost George Bush a significant number of votes and hurt his margin of victory.
Playing Fast and Loose With Military Ballots
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on October 14, 2010. Filed under