Pretty basic stuff, right? But it gives us information we’ve never had before, information that Members of Congress have asked us for in the past, and facts and details that we suspected existed, but couldn’t prove -- until this year, that is. The survey returns are now flowing in at the rate of 40-50 per day -- we gave the LEOs till the end of December, but most are sending us the information NOW, which I like to attribute to the solid relationship that has developed because of the 31 communications we’ve sent this past year and the significant number of them that now call or write or fax or e-mail us asking for answers to some of the military absentee voting “situations” they are facing. These LEOs are, for the most part, true grassroots America and they work hard to get their military absentee ballot job done and done right!
As such, for the first time ever, NDC will have excellent, accurate, firsthand data and information on the facts about military absentee voting, and once we’ve received all the surveys, we plan to put this data into “a meaningful matrix” and share it with all of DOD and the Services AND the Congress AND the Governors AND the Secretaries of State AND the LEO’s AND the military and veterans associations and organizations so they all know factually “what worked and what didn’t, and what the actual factual data shows related to military absentee voting so that changes can be made to the laws to eliminate the problems.”
And actually, a couple of paragraphs ago I said I would cover the bad, which is not having solid data in the past, but I now seem to have cycled back to “the good” in that having this accurate and up-to-date information will provide for the entire “military absentee voting structure” to actually know what happened and thus, hopefully, how to fix it so it works better next election.
So back to “the bad.” And for simplicity sake, allow me to “bulletize”:
Ballots returned, but not counted: In my view, it’s “a fact” that if military absentee ballots were sent by the voter back to their LEO, yet arrived too late to be counted, there’s a problem with the system. Some of our survey results already show that ballots arrived too late to be counted. Our government needs to find out the cause and fix it!
Ballots NOT returned: With all the interest and focus and involvement of the services in the 2004 elections, it’s “bad” that there are votes being cast that aren’t arriving in time to be counted. In some of the numbers we’ve seen, what is SUPER UNSAT is that there are situations where over 50 percent of the ballots sent out didn’t come back in time to be counted or didn’t come back at all. Surely there are all sorts of reasons that could be causing this, but I think all will agree with me that this performance level and any system that provides this kind of result is in sore need of analysis and repair and redesign.
