State must ensure military votes don’t go uncounted

Opinion in The State  21 September 2004

THE VOTE IS A fundamental right for all Americans, as it should be. But if there is one group that stands above the rest of us in deserving to have their vote counted, it is those who serve in the military, particularly those who serve in war zones.

Yet because of a little-noticed change in state law, the already-difficult process of getting ballots to and from our troops stationed overseas has been made even more difficult this year — difficult enough that some, if not many, of those votes will not be counted.

Apparently no one anticipated the problem when lawmakers changed from Aug. 30 to Sept. 10 the date by which political parties must give their official list of candidates to election officials. But the change, which was prompted by this year’s late Republican National Convention, has left local election officials and military families worried that there won’t be enough time for troops to get their ballots mailed back home.

The first problem, as The Herald-Journal of Spartanburg recently reported, is that it takes election officials several weeks to prepare ballots; in Richland County, for example, ballots aren’t expected to be ready until about 30 days before the Nov. 2 election. The second problem is that the mail to and from military addresses, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, is dreadfully slow — averaging 13 days each way under the best of circumstances. That leaves no room for error or delay.

As a result, some of the people who are quite literally putting their lives on the line in defense of our democracy will not have an opportunity to vote in a presidential race that could significantly influence their futures — not to mention important state and local elections.

While state law has made the situation worse here in South Carolina, the problem is not new. Whether to count late-arriving military ballots was among the points of contention in the 2000 presidential race in Florida. The Pentagon worked with the S.C. Election Commission and local election officials in other states that year to test an Internet voting program; but that was abandoned over concerns about computer security. Its more recent efforts have been appalling. This year, according to The New York Times, the Pentagon has set up a program to allow troops to e-mail or fax their ballots directly to a secretive private contractor, which will open them and send them on to local election officials. Fortunately, South Carolina did not sign up for this program, which is an invitation to vote tampering.

What the military should be concentrating on is finding some way to speed up the delivery of ballots.

Election officials in South Carolina say troops can fax their ballots to their local election commissions, but that means someone will see how they vote, and not all troops have access to fax machines. The best thing election officials can do is to do everything they can to speed up the printing of ballots.

And when the General Assembly convenes in January, one of its first orders of business should be making sure this appalling situation doesn’t repeat itself. At the least, the deadline for parties to certify names should be as early as is possible; even this year’s late convention could have allowed a deadline of Sept. 3 instead of Sept. 10. Other options worth considering are requiring election officials to send troops special ballots they quickly print in-house and allowing military ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted.

It’s bad enough that such a thing could occur this year; state and federal officials must do everything they can to make sure it never happens again.