I was chatting 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 overseas voters in a timely fashion is only as good as the legal timelines to figure out who is on the ballots.

That’s where we are today.  The State Board of Elections certified the candidates last week, but 12 of the candidates have objections pending.  Those objections are in the first stage, so even SBE action would still leave election authorities somewhat in the dark as to what the final list of candidates would be.

Programming the election is complicated and not knowing who is on the ballot obviously makes it more so.   When just a single person is objected to, as we had two years ago, it can be more easily worked around.  When a host of candidates are up in the air, it greatly affects the ballot layout.  We basically have to leave enough space on the ballot to insert removed candidates who have challenged their adverse finding at the SBE.  At the same time, we might anticipate that some candidates who were left on will be removed.   Candidate positions can shift and even races can end up changing positions on the ballot depending on the number of candidates.

There’s lots we can do in the meantime to be ready for the final certification.  But there is little doubt that the challenges to petitions are going to mean delays in sending ballots to military and overseas voters.

We’ve filed a memorandum in support of our case.  You can view it here.

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.