OPINION: Give all soldiers the chance to vote
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Imagine if five states announced that they lacked the money and manpower to ship ballots before the fall federal election to precincts in predominantly black rural counties. The Justice Department would shift into fifth gear to assure that those Americans could vote on Nov. 2. Lawsuits would fly like pigeons fleeing a breezy schoolyard.
Now, convert those rural blacks into American GIs serving abroad.
New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington are dragging their feet on the urgent task of delivering absentee midterm-election ballots to overseas service members. But the response at Justice's Voting Rights Division echoes a Louis Armstrong tune: "It's sleepy time down South."
Tomorrow, Sept. 18, will mark 45 days until the election. According to the new Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE Act), that's the deadline by which states must send unmarked ballots overseas. That period should allow ballots to reach GIs - from bases in Germany to trenches in Afghanistan - and return by Election Night.
But these five states have received waivers from the MOVE Act, essentially giving them extensions on their homework. The primary elections on Tuesday gave Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Wisconsin (which was not granted a waiver) only four days to determine party nominees, print ballots, and send them off. State election officials should have scheduled primaries early enough to avoid this headache. Six other states and Washington, D.C., also expressed an inability to meet Saturday's deadline, though their requests for waivers were denied.
Meanwhile, some of the waivers went to states that never demonstrated that they were "unable" to obey the law - the only standard for approving waivers.
As former Justice Department voting rights attorney J. Christian Adams reports, Washington got a waiver despite its Aug. 17 primary, which gave it plenty of time to transmit military ballots. Delaware applied for a waiver "just in case" problems arose. Rhode Island asked for and received a waiver since there might be a hypothetical recount.
The Justice Department routinely sues states to conform to federal voting-rights laws. Such suits now sit unfiled, while fires remain unlit beneath the tails of these lawbreaking states.
Why is the normally hyperactive Obama administration somewhere between drowsy and counterproductive on this matter? Could this concern the fact that military voters lean more Republican than Democratic?
Missed deadlines and other administrative snafus reportedly disenfranchised some 17,000 military voters in 2008. These ballots otherwise might have tipped numerous close elections.
America's uniformed men and women dodge - and sometimes absorb - bullets so that the rest of us can peacefully debate about taxes and mosques. They should expect to choose the leaders who might deploy them into combat - or suddenly call them home.
President Obama's Justice Department should wake up, sue negligent states and assure that every military vote counts on Election Night.
