Rear Admiral [Ret.] Jim Carey is Chairman of the NATIONAL DEFENSE COMMITTEE and NATIONAL DEFENSE PAC. His background includes duty in cruisers and amphibs, at Naval Beach Group, and in the Pentagon, and naval service from Seaman Recruit to Rear Admiral. He also served in the Reagan and George Bush Sr. Administrations. Further details at The National Defense Committee and The National Defense Political Action Committee.
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In truth, like most things in life, military absentee voting in 2004 had “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” Let’s start with the good.
In my view, the Service Secretaries probably did the best job ever of getting the word out to all the troops scattered throughout the world -- they made it clear that they wanted every man and woman eligible to vote to have that opportunity, and they wanted every command to take whatever steps necessary to make that happen. There were probably more messages sent out encouraging the troops to vote and more efforts to ensure Voting Assistance Officers [VAOs] knew and understood their jobs, including where to find answers; and that each VAO was also fully aware that more recent federal laws required that their performance as a VAO was mandated to be commented on in their OER’s and Fitness Reports and Evaluations, which ultimately impact upon their future promotion. In my view, in 2004, attention WAS given right down to the “boots on the ground level.”
And what gives me any credentials to know what was and wasn’t done in the past? Well, back when “Navy airplanes were fueled by coal and our Dad was in the Navy, as my daughters like to say, I was a Voting Assistance Officer on my ship -- so long ago I’m not even sure that was the title back then. I can say from absolute firsthand experience that “nobody told me nuthin,” and other than reading the Instruction and the Manual and the Federal Absentee Ballot Postcard Application, I didn’t know squat. Yet there I was as the ship’s official voting assistance officer, and while there would be a weekly squib in the Ship’s Plan of the Day that was distributed daily throughout the ship encouraging everyone to send in their postcard applications or to be sure to vote, mail delivery was, at best, marginal. With ships in Vietnam headed in every which direction and in and out of all sorts of different ports, it was not uncommon for a package to take 6 months to reach you as the mail chased you from ship to ship and port to port.
My second credential is that in the 2004 elections, an organization I chair, the National Defense Committee [NDC], established a Military Voting Rights Project that spent the last 10 months focused on military absentee voting and efforts, both within DOD and the various services AND State “Secretaries of State” who manage their state’s voting efforts on down to the 5,000+ Local Election Officials (LEOs) that NDC communicated with no less than 31 separate times. So for the first time in recent years I was right in the thick of the effort involving DOD and the various Services and with the various States and with the 5,000+ LEOs, and brother, did I learn a lot.
And that’s the basis for this analysis of “What happened?: the good, the bad, and the ugly.” I’ve already covered the good, indicating that I felt the Service Secretaries did the best job ever of getting the word out and pushing hard for every guy and gal in uniform having the opportunity to vote AND have their vote counted. Translation: They need to first receive their ballot, have time to vote that ballot, and have a transportation/postal system that will get their ballot back to the LEO in time for it to be counted.
Now let’s talk a bit about “the bad.” Because of my NDC linkage and involvement, I’ve realized that in past elections, the greatest “post-election” failing has been in gathering good accurate meaningful data on what actually happened, so that problems can be fixed through changes in the law. To do that, Congress needs to know what was done and what worked and what didn’t, and for the things that didn’t work: whether they were caused by problems with federal law or state law or procedures, or with local laws (i.e. County or Township, depending on who is considered the LEO) that are the most problematic and difficult to change. You can imagine that with 5,000+ local laws, along with some state law and some federal laws, that this could be quite a challenge. But you have to start somewhere, and in NDC’s view, that process begins with obtaining “actual data from the LEO’s” as to what happened or didn’t, and what worked or didn’t. So for the 2004 elections, we sent out a comprehensive survey that asked the LEOs military absentee voting basics, including “How many absentee ballot requests did you get from military personnel; of those you received, how many were sent out; of those you sent out, how many were ‘voted and sent back’; and of those you got back, how many were received in time to be counted?”
