Dec 01 2009
Opposite Directions
The National Defense Authorization Act for this year contained a bipartisan proposal called the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE). It has a number of provisions, most of which have little impact on Illinois voters. For example, it removes the notarization requirement for ballots that some states have but which is absent from Illinois law.
One change is the effective period for a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA). Before this law passed, a person who submits an FPCA is applying for a ballot for the next two federal election years. So an application in 2005 would have entitled a person to a ballot for the 2006 and 2008 federal elections. The new law changes that to a single year. Now, military and overseas voters will have to submit a new application each and every year that they want to vote.
Congressional leaders claimed that this was a desire of election administrators. It certainly wasn’t my desire, but I don’t doubt that some administrators like this provision.
What’s interesting is how this flies in the opposite direction of other election reform efforts. The very people who are claiming the need for automatic and permanent registration for everyone, have now passed legislation that will force annual applications by military personnel overseas, regardless of whether they move. But as I’ve seen so often in the debate about updating our registration system, the reformers’ rhetoric doesn’t match reality.
“In this 21st-century digital computerized world that we live in, it doesn’t make any sense to retain the paper-based voting system that we had in the 1900s,” said Adam Skaggs, counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. The MOVE Act proves that automation “is possible, makes sense from a policy standpoint, and is something that folks on both sides of the aisle will embrace,” he said.
There’s no automatic provision within the MOVE act, except the provision to automatically remove military voters from the list of absentee voters. To equate the MOVE act with the efforts to automatically add every holder of driver’s license to the voter registration rolls, including noncitizens, is absurd.
As to our office’s implementation of this act, we’re waiting for more details about the State of Illinois plan for electronic transmissions. But we do have plans to seek out those voters whose applications have expired. It would be a travesty if the number of military voters in the 2012 election actually dropped because of this legislation.
[...] with someone in DC on my visit there in November about the impact of the MOVE Act, which I discussed in an earlier post. As I told the person, the extra language making it imperative for ballots to go out to military and [...]
[...] that attempts to facilitate voting by overseas and military voters. At the time I wrote about it, I noted something interesting. One change is the effective period for a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA). Before this law [...]