Marie, thank you to your husband and yourself for your collective Service (for they also Serve who stand and wait)...
Here’s a Dumb Kiwi Question: precisely how the Devil do Military votes get “thrown out”? Who is doing this, and why are they not hanged from the nearest lamp-post?
In the US surely destroying somebody else’s vote would be a Federal felony.
In New Zealand we would not tolerate anybody’s vote being thrown out by anyone. Hell, our Ballots are not permitted to leave the polling station: not even the spoiled ones, not even the blank ones.
So how does this happen to the Military ballots? And what can be done to put an immediate stop to this outrage?
In Virginia, I believe ballots were getting thrown out (or at least threatened to be thrown out, I’m not sure of the exact status) on technicalities between the Federal military absentee ballots and state law requirements.
As I said back in 2000 when Gore’s lawyers were all over FL getting military absentee ballots thrown out on minor technicalities, this stuff is playing with fire. This kind of stuff is how military coups get started. No sane person wants to see that.
Military serving overseas have to vote by “absentee” ballot and mail them to their home district. These districts collect the ballots and some are rejected for various reasons such as, incorrect or incomplete info or arriving after the deadline. These decisions are somewhat flexible and in the past Military ballots were given the maximum consideration.
Ever since the debacle in Florida in 2000, when the Dems realized that “disqualifying” the military absentee vote brought them close to turning the whole state, they have been doing it with shocking and unreported regularity.
Yes someone should literally hang for this but the people of my country, by and large, don’t seek out such information, they wait for the MSM to feed it to them and thus never are awakened to the travesty going on in our own dooryard.
I really don’t know if the problem can be summed up easily. Most of the time the votes are thrown out on a technicality or arrive too late. Some of these guys have huge delays in the mail that sweeps the rug out from under them. Some states won’t send the ballots out early enough to get them to the soldier and back again. Every state has it’s own rules for absentee votes and I think it gets difficult to stay on top of all of them.
Whatever the reasons, only about 5% of our uniformed service men and women end up having a voice in our voting process. And trust me, it’s not because they don’t get it or they are apathetic.
I hate to say it, but after the ACORN voter fraud crap and the difficulty we have counting military votes, I’m thinking that we have to streamline and secure the voting process. Too many states are making a mess out of this. An election here is starting to resemble that of a Banana Republic.