The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Jim Hanson On Afghanistan, With A Side Of Military Voting

Posted on | July 13, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Check out His Badness, Jim Hanson, of BlackFive fame:
Hanson’s a frequent visitor on RT, rapping with Alyona on various topics. I’m only endorsing Hanson himself, while not actually saying whether or not Hanson’s remarks reflect any ground truth. Dunno.
One side effect of the Surge Recover in Afghanistan is that there will be a flood of additional voters for 2012. Hopefully, despite problems that von Spkovsky notes over at NRO, this will have a positive effect on voting:

MVPP surveyed 24 states. Of the 2 million military voters covered by the report, 15.8 percent requested absentee ballots, but only 4.6 percent cast absentee ballots that were counted. This is at least partly due to the difficulty and uncertainty of the process. Both numbers were below the 2006 midterm election figures, when 5.5 percent of military and overseas voters cast absentee ballots that were counted.

MVPP also found that local election officials in 14 states and the District of Columbia failed to comply with the federal requirement that all absentee ballots must be mailed at least 45 days prior to the election. That requirement, imposed by the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE Act), was intended to ensure that voters had enough time to receive and mail back a ballot, given the long transit times for overseas mail, particularly in war zones. These failures affected more than 65,000 voters.

Most of the states did a good job counting the ballots they actually got back — the overall acceptance rate was more than 94 percent. However, there was one glaring and shameful exception: The state of New York rejected nearly one-third of all absentee ballots from military voters. Based on a combined estimate of military members who voted in person in the U.S. as well as overseas voters, MVPP concluded that the overall turnout rate of military voters was 11.6 percent. Since the turnout rate of all voters was 41.6 percent in the 2010 election, this means that military voters were 3.5 times less likely to vote than other voting-age citizens.

This is a significant voting issue that the Left never seems to notice. Can’t figure out why.

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