thedrifter
07-18-03, 05:31 AM
07-16-2003
From the Editor:
Out of the 2000 Fiasco, Online Absentee Voting for Military
By Ed Offley
Coming next year to a foxhole, hangar, warship or TOC near you: The 2004 presidential election.
Remember the election disaster of 2000 in Florida? Where the nation had to wait for the name of its next president for nearly a month while cross-eyed election officials pored over dimpled chads, and where a three-digit difference in popular votes for George W. Bush and Al Gore led to a nasty, three-week guerilla war of lawyers, ballot recounts and court hearings? And – most galling for military people – where Democratic political operatives tried to get military absentee ballots thrown out en masse on minor technicalities?
Polli Brunelli hopes to spare all of you serving in uniform overseas from a repeat of that nightmare.
As director of the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program, Brunelli for the past year has been managing the development of SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment), which aims to provide overseas voters – including military service personnel and their family members – the chance to cast absentee ballots over the internet in next year’s presidential primaries and November general election.
As directed by the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986, which applies to about 6 million potential voters residing outside the United States, SERVE builds on a tiny experiment in 2000 where just 84 voters overseas utilized a prototype web-based voting network to cast votes in the state and federal elections.
For 2004, SERVE will significantly expand to include 10 states with a limit of 100,000 voters participating. The program at present will be restricted to eligible voters residing overseas whose homes in the United States are in South Carolina and Hawaii, or in a small number of counties in Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state.
“Due to the amount of technical work required to define and include any new state requirements in the system design and to analyze local interfacing alternatives, no further states can be added to the project,” SERVE officials said in a question-and-answer sheet on the project website.
“Internet voting takes just seconds instead of weeks if you were to put that ballot in the mail and send it off,” Brunelli told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday. “What we're trying to do is make sure that we have an alternative out there for those people who are unable to vote by mail.”
After the Florida fiasco 2½ years ago, a Pentagon survey of personnel stationed overseas found that 69 percent military personnel serving abroad participated in the presidential election, but 29 percent of them either did not receive a ballot at all or received it too late to be counted. Additional problems emerged when ballots sent through the military mail system without a postmark (which is permitted) were subsequently rejected by state and local elections officials whose deadlines required one.
And thanks to Democratic Party attorney Mark Herron, lawyers representing the Gore campaign showed up at all 67 county election offices in Florida armed with a legal memo instructing them to block as many military absentee votes as they could on the premise that military people tend to vote Republican more than Democratic.
If the 2004 internet voting experiment proves successful, the $22 million program could be expanded to serve the more than 6 million military and civilian voters living overseas, officials say.
Voters participating in SERVE will be able to register online to vote and cast ballots from any computer using Microsoft Windows with internet access – either Internet Explorer version 5.5 and above or Netscape Navigator 6.x and above. Local election officials will use the system to process voter registration applications, to send ballots to voters and to accept ballots instantly when cast.
If you are a military service member serving out of your state of record and are interested in participating in Project SERVE next year, first confirm that your state of residence (and in eight of the 10 states, that your locality as well is participating) in the 2004 election. Then all you have to do is go to the SERVE website and obtain a secure digital signature that will enable you to receive and send an electronic ballot in both the primary and general elections. The registration portion of the system is currently still being developed and is not yet operational.
Those Americans protecting our security deserve a voting system that provides their ballots with the same degree of security. The only criticism I have is that all eligible people from all 50 states will not yet be able to participate in 2004.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=20&rnd=984.6457357486515
Sempers,
Roger
:marine:
From the Editor:
Out of the 2000 Fiasco, Online Absentee Voting for Military
By Ed Offley
Coming next year to a foxhole, hangar, warship or TOC near you: The 2004 presidential election.
Remember the election disaster of 2000 in Florida? Where the nation had to wait for the name of its next president for nearly a month while cross-eyed election officials pored over dimpled chads, and where a three-digit difference in popular votes for George W. Bush and Al Gore led to a nasty, three-week guerilla war of lawyers, ballot recounts and court hearings? And – most galling for military people – where Democratic political operatives tried to get military absentee ballots thrown out en masse on minor technicalities?
Polli Brunelli hopes to spare all of you serving in uniform overseas from a repeat of that nightmare.
As director of the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program, Brunelli for the past year has been managing the development of SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment), which aims to provide overseas voters – including military service personnel and their family members – the chance to cast absentee ballots over the internet in next year’s presidential primaries and November general election.
As directed by the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986, which applies to about 6 million potential voters residing outside the United States, SERVE builds on a tiny experiment in 2000 where just 84 voters overseas utilized a prototype web-based voting network to cast votes in the state and federal elections.
For 2004, SERVE will significantly expand to include 10 states with a limit of 100,000 voters participating. The program at present will be restricted to eligible voters residing overseas whose homes in the United States are in South Carolina and Hawaii, or in a small number of counties in Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state.
“Due to the amount of technical work required to define and include any new state requirements in the system design and to analyze local interfacing alternatives, no further states can be added to the project,” SERVE officials said in a question-and-answer sheet on the project website.
“Internet voting takes just seconds instead of weeks if you were to put that ballot in the mail and send it off,” Brunelli told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday. “What we're trying to do is make sure that we have an alternative out there for those people who are unable to vote by mail.”
After the Florida fiasco 2½ years ago, a Pentagon survey of personnel stationed overseas found that 69 percent military personnel serving abroad participated in the presidential election, but 29 percent of them either did not receive a ballot at all or received it too late to be counted. Additional problems emerged when ballots sent through the military mail system without a postmark (which is permitted) were subsequently rejected by state and local elections officials whose deadlines required one.
And thanks to Democratic Party attorney Mark Herron, lawyers representing the Gore campaign showed up at all 67 county election offices in Florida armed with a legal memo instructing them to block as many military absentee votes as they could on the premise that military people tend to vote Republican more than Democratic.
If the 2004 internet voting experiment proves successful, the $22 million program could be expanded to serve the more than 6 million military and civilian voters living overseas, officials say.
Voters participating in SERVE will be able to register online to vote and cast ballots from any computer using Microsoft Windows with internet access – either Internet Explorer version 5.5 and above or Netscape Navigator 6.x and above. Local election officials will use the system to process voter registration applications, to send ballots to voters and to accept ballots instantly when cast.
If you are a military service member serving out of your state of record and are interested in participating in Project SERVE next year, first confirm that your state of residence (and in eight of the 10 states, that your locality as well is participating) in the 2004 election. Then all you have to do is go to the SERVE website and obtain a secure digital signature that will enable you to receive and send an electronic ballot in both the primary and general elections. The registration portion of the system is currently still being developed and is not yet operational.
Those Americans protecting our security deserve a voting system that provides their ballots with the same degree of security. The only criticism I have is that all eligible people from all 50 states will not yet be able to participate in 2004.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=20&rnd=984.6457357486515
Sempers,
Roger
:marine: