On military absentee ballot voting:

[Earth_First]

I came across this while reading about absentee voting earlier this evening, the details were incomprehensible...

About one in every four of our military personnel serving overseas will be disenfranchised this year. The National Defense Committee estimates that 24 percent of all military absentee ballots filed this year will be lost, spoiled or otherwise made pointless by government interference or incompetence.

Typically, military ballots were challenged on technicalities. Did the envelope lack a stamp? (Postage is generally free for those serving in combat zones.) Did it arrive a day after the Florida deadline (even if the ballot was clearly mailed weeks ahead of Election Day)? Such "problems" are well beyond the control of military voters and wholly divorced from concern about fraudulent ballots. Yet in many cases, it was enough to get military votes tossed.

Time remains a critical issue. One reason overseas voters are disenfranchised so often is that states take so long to finalize their ballots. In Nevada's 2004 election, for example, lawyers filed so many challenges to the way the ballot appeared, the final version wasn't ready until late September. After the usual bureaucratic delays, many absentee ballots were not mailed until early October -- too late for, say, a sailor in the Persian Gulf or a grunt in Afghanistan to get it, fill it out and return it before Election Day.Slow and unreliable mail delivery compounds the problem. Many states require a 15- to 30-day notice to deliver a ballot to an absentee voter. Even if a soldier in the field requests a ballot in timely fashion, it may arrive too late to be useful. Or it may arrive only to find that the would-be voter has been ordered elsewhere in the interim. The reality of military life, especially in a hot war, often makes it extremely difficult to get mail to the intended recipient in timely fashion.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/opinion/15275604.htm

[SharonAnn]

1. The standards varied by county. Democratic leaning counties

got lots of ballots bounced.

Republican leaning counties got lots of questionable ballots counted.