The military services haven’t created offices on all overseas bases to help soldiers cast their ballots, citing money shortages
John Solomon
WashingtonGuardian
9/6/2012
With another election lurking around the corner, the Pentagon is getting a bad review for its efforts to comply with a new law designed to make it easier for overseas military personnel to cast their ballots.
The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act was passed by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Barack Obama and was supposed to make it easier for service people deployed overseas and U.S. citizens living abroad to cast ballots back in their home states.
One of the key provisions required each military branch to create an installation voting assistance office (IVAO) for every military base outside an immediate combat zone.
But the Pentagon’s inspector general, the military’s internal watchdog, reported Tuesday it got a disappointing result when it tried to locate such voting assistance offices on each installation earlier this year.
“Results were clear. Our attempts to contact IVAOs failed about 50 percent of the time,” the inspector general reported…
The article continues at the WashingtonGuardian.
Related: GOP senators ask Panetta to make sure troops can vote
Six Republican senators are asking Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta personally to intervene to ensure that U.S. troops stationed away from home get the chance to register and vote in the upcoming election.
They say Pentagon officials are ignoring a 2009 law that ordered the military to set up a special voting-assistance office at every U.S. base around the world, to make sure troops can negotiate the confusing patchwork of 50 different sets of state registration and absentee voting requirements, and get their ballots mailed in time…
