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Part One of 3
2012–Votes cast by absentee and early voting have more than doubled in the past 12 years, leading the report's authors to warn that these voter-friendly initiatives could sabotage the accuracy of the overall election process.
The biggest challenge to voting accuracy in the U.S. isn't hanging chads or hacked voting machines—it's the mail. A new report by the Voting Technology Project (VTP)—a joint venture between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—finds that even though absentee ballots account for about only a quarter of all ballots cast during an election, the number of uncounted absentee and election-day ballots may be roughly the same.
The researchers estimate that up to 3.9 million absentee ballots were requested but not received by voters in the 2008 presidential election. Another 2.9 million ballots sent to voters requesting them were not returned for counting. And 800,000 returned absentee ballots were rejected for one reason or another. In all, 21 percent of requested absentee ballots were never counted in 2008.
States should discourage absentee balloting among voters who do not require this service.
Likewise, election officials should quash the idea of Internet voting until the technology can be secured and audited.
The researchers also call for additional research into new methods to get usable ballots to military and overseas civilian voters securely, accurately and quickly, and to make sure those ballots are returned in time to be counted.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/votes-by-mail-are-less-likely-to-be-counted/
Military votes don't count
Obama Justice Department excuses failure to deliver ballots to troops–April 16, 2012
Military voters must feel like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. Election after election, certain state and local election officials fail to meet the deadline for sending absentee ballots. The outcome is often the same - thousands of ballots are received too close to the election to be returned or, if they are returned, the ballots arrive after the deadline to be counted. In either case, the military voter is disenfranchised.
Congress attempted to fix this time loop in 2009. The MOVE Act was a new law that created a simple requirement: State and local election officials had to send absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before an election. Yet, this simple requirement has been hard to follow.
In 2010, for example, local election officials in at least 14 states failed to comply with the new law. The worst offenders, counties and boroughs in New York and Illinois, missed the deadline by more than two weeks. More than 40,000 military and overseas ballots were impacted by this failure with many of the ballots being sent only 25 days before the election.
Two years later, military voters are waking to the same rotten story in the presidential primaries.
Thus far, at least three states - Alabama, Ohio and Wisconsin - have had local election officials that failed to mail their absentee military ballots on time. Wisconsin and Alabama are repeat offenders from 2010.
Much of the blame for this recurring nightmare rests with the Department of Justice and its Voting Section. Time and again, the Voting Section has been dilatory in its investigations and has failed to take timely action. These failures were well documented in 2010.
But, even when the Voting Section does act, the negotiated settlements with states often lack meaningful relief or real consequences for the local election officials who missed the deadline.
Take, for example, the case against New York in 2010. Even though standard mail delivery to a war zone may take 30 or more days for the one-way delivery of a ballot, the Voting Section negotiated a settlement that allowed counties and New York City to mail absentee ballots using standard mail delivery. In other words, many of the ballots sent under the agreement would not arrive before the election.
The flawed nature of the New York settlement soon became evident. According to New York’s official data, local election officials rejected more than 30 percent of the absentee ballots that were returned by military voters in 2010. These voters should have been protected by the Voting Section, but they weren’t.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/16/military-votes-dont-count/