I am not a diary poster, more often an avid reader and frequent commenter. However, today I got into a discussion with Peter Laesch and I felt that the subject of absentee ballots for our troops in Iraq should be brought forth in a diary.
Peter's diary titled 2008 and John Laesch deserves a read if you have not seen it. It is a good diary with lots of good comments.
In the course of posting comments, I asked Peter about the feeling among those soldiers he knew concerning the mid-terms and about any problems with absentee ballots.
Peter
replied that he is still waiting for his ballot and is worried because he is about to leave Iraq.
In the meantime I did a Google search to see what, if anything, was being reported about problems with deployed troops voting and I came across this article in the Mercury News.
I was especially disturbed by the following passage:
During the next six weeks, thousands of service members are expected to fax or e-mail ballots over international communications networks that are susceptible to interception and tampering, putting those votes at risk.
``I can't for the life of me figure out how the Defense Department decided this is the right thing to do,'' said Doug Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa.
Critics of the Pentagon's system identified what they described as other troubling flaws:
* Soldiers are not warned about risks to their personal information and voting choices when they e-mail or fax their ballots;
* Soldiers who fax or e-mail ballots will be required to waive their right to a secret ballot;
* Soldiers are not informed that ballots they e-mail directly to the Department of Defense will be processed by an outside contractor, whose executives have made contributions to Republican organizations.
The article is dated September 28th and I cannot find anything more current. It is my hope that any soldier, sailor, marine or airman deployed should be allowed to vote in confidence. That last paragraph about the DoD contractor is especially disturbing. A few years ago I would have thought it an outlandish statement, now I find it a frightening possibility.
I heard that there were problems with counting absentee ballots among others in Florida in 2000. There should be no problem with this now. If these men and women are serving, they should not have any problem making their voices heard, no matter what they have to say.
I don't know what the Kossack community can do, if anything, about this. Over the last few years the integrity of our electoral system has suffered tremendously. It must not fail for those who serve and put everything on the line. If it does, it should be one more indictable crime added to the list.