Official: Absentee votes may go uncounted – again

[donsu]

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-289521.php

Thousands of votes from U.S. troops overseas could go uncounted again in November without emergency legislation extending deadlines for the ballots, a Chicago election official warned President Bush in a letter Tuesday. Nearly 30 percent of military voters who requested ballots in 2000 didn’t get them in time to vote.

Theresa M. Petrone, a Democratic member of Chicago’s three-person Board of Election Commissioners, told Bush the problem could be solved if he proposed emergency legislation giving election officials up to 14 days after Election Day to collect and count ballots.

-snip-

“Every election cycle, election authorities such as Chicago receive military absentee ballots days or even weeks after the deadline, thus disqualifying these votes from being included in the election tally,” Petrone wrote. “With hundreds of thousands of military personnel serving overseas, the voting bloc obviously could determine the outcome of our next presidential election.”

-snip-

Still, Richard said the military is working to raise awareness among troops and improve methods by the U.S. Postal Service.
-snip-
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they are going to blame the Postal Service, while bushgang moles in the Postal Service cause delays

[genius]

1. Absentee votes may be the only ones counted this year

We need a paper trail.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Only the ones for Kerry will be "uncounted"

[July]

3. I have mixed feelings on this.

It's important that the military votes get counted. But in the Florida 2000 debacle, the rules of the state of Florida concerning military votes were ignored because the Bush camp waved the flag (and expected the bulk of those votes to go to Bush).

EVERYONE who registers and who votes has to follow some series of procedures established by law. I'm not crazy about what happened in Florida, when military votes did not have to meet established standards. If the rest of us (including Americans abroad, absentee voters, the disabled, the illiterate) have to follow some norms, so should the military.

And I know from relatives in the Postal Service that they get blamed for lots of processing problems that happen at the point of origin or delivery.

I do support procedures that make it easy for the military to vote.

[Eagle_Eye]

4. The way I feel is

Forget the military. They are going to vote for Bush anyway. In Iraq they cheered for Bush sending them to die but would not sit at the same table as Senator Clinton who wanted to bring them home alive.