April 29th, 2008
Email voting for overseas troops?
The Pentagon is pushing states to allow email balloting for troops overseas but so far few states are playing along, AP reports.
“The personnel that fight our wars, the people who are most affected by the decisions on the use of the military, are being systematically denied the right to vote,” said Bob Carey, a board member of the Overseas Vote Foundation, a voting rights group. “I find that pretty tough to swallow. If a president decides to deploy military troops somewhere, it’s these troops that are going to go.”
But in light of the e-voting machine fiasco, there is serious resistance among secretaries of states to re-enter electronic voting of any kind. One state that allows it is Indiana, where secretary of state Todd Rokita says:
“The fact of the matter is, we’re voting in the same way we were voting in the 1850s,” Rokita said of many other states. While a number of states are looking at the e-mail process to speed up delivery of ballots to military voters, he said the issue “is tied up in the national debate on whether we need a paper trail. Some are so scared of technology, they want to be tied to a piece of paper.”
