Suppressing the overseas vote

[Guest guest]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/salon/0,,1335573,00.html

 

Suppressing the overseas vote

 

Record numbers of Americans abroad have registered, but bureaucratic

snafus may prevent many from actually voting, writes Alix Christie

 

Monday October 25, 2004

 

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat is pumped. Two weeks ago, sitting in an

internet cafe on Munich's Odeonplatz, the software marketer who

crafted a hugely successful voter registration website, pulls up

numbers that show a remarkable spike in Americans overseas mobilising

to defeat George W Bush. Between her site and another out of Hong

Kong, Democrats have registered 140,000 new voters, 40% of them from

swing states - and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Americans

abroad, roused to a boiling fury by a Bush doctrine that has smeared

America's good name across the globe, are looking like the " silent

swing vote " in several key battleground states. Overseas registration

for both parties is up by 400% over 2000; estimates put the tally of

possible civilian votes as high as 2 million.

 

Then the panicked emails start flooding in. Today, less than two weeks

before the tightest presidential race in memory, untold thousands of

overseas voters still have not received their ballots - and clearly

won't be able to get them back in time. Late primaries and legal

challenges to Ralph Nader's appearance on the ballot delayed mailings

from half the battleground states. In swing states, including Florida,

Ohio and New Mexico, different versions of the ballot have gone out,

sowing wild confusion. In Pennsylvania alone, at least three versions

were mailed overseas, in successive, chaotic waves - with Nader and

without him, plus a blank one-size-fits-all ballot with no names at all.

 

Activists now fear that huge numbers of Americans overseas - both

military and civilian - may be as disenfranchised as they were in

2000, when anywhere from 10 to 40% of overseas ballots, depending on

the county, just plain never showed up. But, far from helping

civilians, the Federal Voting Assistance Programme (FVAP) has dragged

its feet. A small liaison office based in the Pentagon, the FVAP

provides voting materials to the departments of defence and state for

soldiers and civilians abroad, and preaches overseas election law to

thousands of local election officials back home.

Advertiser links

Car Finance

 

Find Cheap ways for you to finance your car today.

autoinsurance-directory.com

Guaranteed Car Finance

 

As low as 3.65% with your excellent credit. Free quotes. No...

householdauto.com

Guaranteed Car Finance

 

Free insiders guide to automobile financing. Get it today...

realfinanceadvice.com

 

The Government Accountability Office excoriated the agency for losing

thousands of overseas votes in 2000, but the FVAP insists it has

corrected its problems this year. Frustrated civilian advocates,

however, say the FVAP remains biased and ineffective. Despite reforms,

they attest, it still has not shaken its Pentagon roots: It spends the

bulk of its energy getting out a heavily Republican vote among half a

million service people - but has failed the far greater numbers of

civilians (an estimated 4 million, by most counts) who tend to vote a

different way.

 

The tsunami of overseas civilian voters this year has only made the

inequity more glaring. The agency was overwhelmed by a flood that has

clogged its fax lines, telephones and email. It has blocked access to

its website to civilian voters abroad, given military voters access to

electronic ballot-request systems that civilians cannot use, and

subcontracted sensitive election work to a company with strong

Republican ties. For months, it failed to heed requests from the state

department to post an emergency substitute ballot on its website that

will mainly help civilians living far from consulates and military

bases. Finally, on October 21, with only 12 days till the election, it

will post a downloadable version of the federal write-in absentee

ballot, known as FWAB: a last-ditch device intended for the precise

situation in which thousands of overseas voters now find themselves.

 

Those who've busted their guts to get out the overseas civilian vote

on both sides are relieved but still angry. " Considering 2000 and the

fact everybody knew this was going to be a close race, they should

have seen it coming, " says Joan Hills, co-chair of Republicans Abroad.

" The obstacles that have been thrown up are incredible, " says Jim

Brenner, executive director of AOK (Americans Overseas for Kerry), an

arm of the Democratic National Committee. Samuel F Wright, director of

the Military Voting Rights Project of the National Defence Committee,

and a Navy Reserve officer who has spent 25 years observing the FVAP,

says: " Frankly, I'm not impressed with them. They're sort of going

through the motions. I've been pinging on DoD for four years that this

is the perfect situation for the emergency ballot. " Voters who have

requested but not received their ballot by now can dispatch the FWAB

in its place. (If the real ballot subsequently arrives, election

officials are required to discard the FWAB and count the regular ballot.)

 

A million hard copies of the FWAB have been sent to military bases in

Germany and Asia and to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - two for

every member of the military, Wright says - who surely deserve them.

But on the civilian side, the record is spottier. The state

department, charged with helping civilians overseas, ordered its

consulates and embassies to stockpile the form. But Democrats Abroad

reports that many have been caught short-handed and that direct voter

requests to the FVAP have gone unfulfilled. In one pathetic twist,

employees of DaimlerChrysler in Stuttgart had to beg forms from the

military at the gate of the base last week, a voting officer said.

 

Because so much hangs on key states, and on the possibly widespread

use of an untested, little-known ballot, the potential for disaster is

enormous. " If this election is close, 2000 is going to look like a

cakewalk, " says Margo Miller, a London-based lawyer for AOK. " It's

going to be so messy in so many places, the fact that the FWAB hasn't

been easier to get is inexcusable. "

 

The Pentagon responds that the two major parties began asking for the

online FWAB only in late September and that it has moved " mountains of

bureaucracy " to get the form online. Starting now, the tiny bureau of

14 civil servants in suburban Virginia will get the word out to

election officials in 3,142 American counties that the downloaded

version of the write-in ballot is good to go.

 

But the programme's record does not inspire much confidence. Indeed,

voters contacting officials to ask about the ballot have been shocked

at the ignorance they've encountered. In Nepal, one embassy worker

said the ballot could be mailed from the United States, which it

cannot; in Chester County, Pennsylvania, an election supervisor had no

idea what it was. Says Wright of the Military Voting Rights Project:

" Nobody has ever heard of it. The FVAP does show up at meetings and

presentations, but I bet a lot of the 5,000 election officials don't

go to those meetings, judging from the very basic questions we get back. "

 

While waiting for the FVAP to act, both parties gyrated over the

internet. AOK put up its own version online with the disclaimer that

no one knew if such ballots would be accepted; Democrats Abroad and

the two main registration websites did not. Republicans Abroad then

snitched the AOK form, without the disclaimer, and put it on its site,

only to shamefacedly pull it off when told that, until the FVAP

formally approved it, nobody could use the darn thing. AOK finally

sent out 25,000 hard copies at its own expense to voters from swing

states who'd signed up on the Overseas Vote 2004 website.

 

The overarching problem is the scant resources allotted civilian

voters, who outnumber the military overseas by at least eight to one.

While all applaud the goal of making sure men and women fighting for

our country can exercise their right to vote, civilians point out that

they are Americans, too. And the FVAP has a history of favouring the

military, not least because the department of defence has a captive,

easily identified audience and far more money and muscle than the

state department. Citizens abroad are far harder to find than

soldiers: Embassies have direct contact only with a small minority of

those who have registered to be alerted and evacuated in case of a

disaster - though one might call mass disenfranchisement a disaster of

another degree.

 

Highly publicised missteps this year have hardly restored faith in the

FVAP. Civilian voters still have trouble getting through to the agency

and are barred from the email ballot request-and-delivery website that

is available to soldiers from ten states. More worryingly, a pilot

email voting system signed on to by Missouri, Utah and North Dakota,

in which soldiers can email ballots to a contractor that then faxes

those ballots to local jurisdictions, is being operated by Omega

Technologies, headed by a former Republican Party donor, according to

the New York Times.

 

The Times also reports that earlier this week two Democratic members

of Congress, Henry Waxman of California and Carolyn B Maloney of New

York, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the

FVAP. Among their concerns is that the agency's online

ballot-retrieval system is not open to most civilians abroad.

 

Miller, the AOK lawyer, says the FVAP, which moved only two years ago

from the Pentagon department that buys soap and toilet paper into the

personnel department, " is basically focused on the military and

doesn't care " . A department of defence insider involved in getting out

the vote overseas puts it more harshly: " The senior military

leadership will only admit they have a responsibility to help

civilians get involved in elections if you force it down their throat.

They're only interested in the soldiers. "

 

The Pentagon denies these charges. As each misstep has occurred,

deputy undersecretary of defence Charles Abell has defended the FVAP,

saying it is making a heroic effort to reach all citizens overseas

through voting workshops and toll-free telephone numbers. Indeed, all

observers agree that the FVAP has gone to extraordinary lengths this

year to get out the military vote. Still, Democrats suspect that in

the case of the online ballot, it's no accident that the agency did

not move faster: The measure mainly benefits civilians, many more of

whom will support John Kerry than their counterparts in the military.

 

Dzieduszycka-Suinat frets darkly that " higher up, someone is saying:

'Make sure there are problems.' " From the perspective of Wright, from

the Military Voting Rights Project, political pressure is a given.

" When Clinton was in charge, they tried to suppress the military vote

for that very reason, " he says. " I would not disagree, " he says, that

politics this year, too, plays a role. Faced with a voting programme

that at best is ineffective, and at worst partisan, ordinary citizens

have been forced to pick up the slack. Wright's organisation, for

instance, blitzed the country's election offices with faxed alerts

telling them how to process the write-in ballot. And it is thanks

mainly to the efforts of two smart groups of expatriates that tens of

thousands of new voters made it through the registration process at

all. The FVAP distributed millions of registration postcards, but

without help, the complex rules daunted many civilians.

 

The state department, stretched thin by new visa regulations imposed

after 9/11, has nowhere near the resources in its consulates to help

citizens that the department of defence has deployed for its soldiers

abroad, a high-ranking official said. Though it has done its best to

walk civilians through the 369-page " Black Book " of state-by-state

election rules, " we literally don't have the staff to be able to do

this, " the official said. The upshot: There is a military voting

assistance officer for every 30 to 50 soldiers, but the onus is on the

civilian to fill out the form alone.

 

Democrats Abroad thus began the campaign season camped at card tables

on foreign street corners and screenings of English-language movies,

walking voters one by one through the Byzantine process. In late May,

Dzieduszycka-Suinat and Mitch Wolfson, head of AOK Germany, looked at

each other and said, in the words of Wolfson: " There has to be a

better way. " In July, they took the federal registration form,

simplified it, and lobbed it into cyberspace. Beyond the 140,000

mostly Democrats who registered online, another 170,000 physically

registered through Democrats Abroad, according to John McQueen, the

group's international campaign chair. Thousands more signed up through

another clever website, the Amsterdam-based Tell an American to Vote.

 

What infuriates AOK more than anything else, though, is the vast

disparity in money and energy between the military and civilian

efforts. Overseas civilians, who turn out at half the rate of the

military, arguably need more help, they say. While FVAP spent its

$5.5m budget mainly to reach half a million soldiers - a ratio that

works out to $11 per vote - the Democratic National Committee spent

$50,000 on a website that worked out to less than 75 cents a vote.

 

Republicans eschewed pavement-pounding and bought dozens of ads in the

military Stars & Stripes, International Herald Tribune and

English-language papers in key countries like Mexico, Canada and

Israel, which together host some 1.5 million eligible American voters,

says Hills of Republicans Abroad. Registrations are up fourfold over

2000. The Bush campaign is focused on large communities of American

retirees overseas and counting on its traditional bases among

businesspeople abroad and the military, where, Hills says, " we're very

confident we're going to get a strong majority " .

 

Which way these hordes of new voters go is, in fact, the big overseas

question - assuming they get to vote. Democrats and Republicans alike

see gold in both the civilian and military camps. What's undisputed is

that the Bush administration has galvanised overseas voters as never

before. " The entire world is against Bush, and we reflect that view

that America has lost all its credibility abroad, " says McQueen of

Democrats Abroad. " I was tired of cringing in the supermarket whenever

I spoke English to my kids, knowing how much we as Americans were

hated, " says Dzieduszycka-Suinat. Hills, for her part, reports that

many Republicans, angered at what they see as unjust attacks, are

coming out in equal droves to support the president. On both sides,

stories abound of older Americans, and dual citizens who've kept their

American passports, emerging like Rip Van Winkle to vote for the first

time in 30 or 40 years.

 

In reality, the political affiliation of these voters is unknown. Both

sides claim a 60% edge: Democrats, based on a Zogby study, say that

Americans with passports tend to vote liberal. Republicans, meanwhile,

cite international business and the conservatism of Pentagon civilian

employees and soldiers. Yet both estimates are what military people

call SWAG - scientific wild-ass guesses - about a woolly and

ever-growing overseas population of civil servants, diplomats,

employees of global businesses, students, journalists, artists,

academics and, yes, soldiers on the battlefield.

 

Since January, when the Pentagon decreed " 100% contact, " every officer

and enlisted man or woman has had a registration application pressed

into his or her hands. Soldiers have been exhorted to vote at daily

formation and while watching ballgames on Armed Forces TV, and they

are reminded that " It's Your Future - Vote for It " on the bottom on

their paycheques. After the " horror story " of 2000, the military is

" extremely vigilant " this time around, says Captain Christina

Maxwell-Borges, a voting assistance officer at the US Army

Installation Management Agency in Stuttgart.

 

At US Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, voting activists and

Americans who've worked for the Army for decades say ordinary soldiers

are more motivated than they've ever seen. Even with the massive

deployment of voting officers, a non-partisan citizens group like the

NAACP, which conducted registration drives on base, was swamped.

" Often we couldn't keep up with the demand, " says Billee Manigault, an

NAACP volunteer. " There's a definite interest in participating, "

echoes Charles Keene of Democrats Abroad and the NAACP. " From almost

everyone you heard, it was, 'You better believe I'm going to vote.' "

 

Despite several recent polls showing staunch support for President

Bush among high-ranking officers, soldiers on base and Pentagon

civilians active in Democratic politics say the mood in the military

is far more mixed. The controversial mission in Iraq has brought a sea

change in political attitudes on base, these observers report.

McQueen, a retired military civil servant, says, " You're not seeing

the kind of pressure to vote Republican you always had in the past. "

 

The strong pro-Republican culture that emerged in the military in the

wake of Vietnam has begun to splinter, many observers say. A report in

the Washington Monthly last year described rank-and-file soldiers, who

are disproportionately non-white, working-class and female, as

increasingly diverging from an ideologically conservative officer

corps. " For a long time here, Democrats were in the closet, " concurs

Trenton Browne, a military security contractor who works on bases from

Heidelberg to Kaiserslautern. " Now in the lower ranks you hear people

speaking openly about their dissent. "

 

Gauging the overseas vote thus becomes a numbers game. Military

turnout at home and abroad is high. More than 60% of soldiers overseas

voted in 2000, double the record of expatriates, who turned out at a

rate of 37%, according to the FVAP (though in both groups, the number

of uncounted votes dropped those figures by at least 15%). Many expect

even higher overseas military turnout this year. How many of those

500,000 active duty service people will vote for Kerry, or Bush, is

the question.

 

A survey of 4,000 service people, released last week by the Military

Times, revealed strong loyalty to the president: 72% of those on

active duty would vote for him, and 17% would vote for Kerry. In the

view of military analyst Peter Feaver of Duke University, the early

traction Kerry had with the troops has been lost by his recent

hammering of the war as a " colossal mistake " . Being a decorated

Vietnam veteran doesn't improve Kerry's stock with the " career

military " people polled by the Military Times, either; in fact,

two-thirds hold the senator's long-ago anti-war activism against him.

 

The survey, however, concentrated on higher-ranking service people,

and is not representative of the rank and file. Along Heidelberg's

main street, off-duty soldiers, some fresh from combat in Iraq,

divided evenly between rejecting Kerry because " he doesn't support the

troops " and supporting him " because a lot of us feel jerked around " .

" People think the military is totally Republican, and that's

definitely not true, " says one strolling soldier, a burly 30-year-old

from Florida. " There's a lot of different views within the ranks. "

Capt Maxwell-Borges, the Stuttgart voting officer, agrees.

" Surprisingly, it's been really mixed, " she says. " A lot of people

support Kerry because he's a veteran and says he's going to increase

military spending, and others are the more traditional

pro-Republicans. But I've been on bases in the past three elections

and I have to say that this time [political views] seem a lot more

varied. "

 

No one expects the soldier vote to swing to Kerry, but a softening of

Bush's overseas military support could be significant. " Even 100%

military turnout overseas only equals 160,000 additional votes, "

points out Brett Rierson, co-founder of the Democratic Hong Kong

website. With activists guesstimating that the overseas civilian haul

could be as high as 2 million, a strong showing for Kerry among

enlisted troops could neutralise the Republican advantage.

 

In any event, it's unlikely anyone will know until well after November

2. Several states, in a scramble to accommodate overseas voters' late

ballots, have extended their deadlines. As it now stands, Florida,

Washington, Iowa, Colorado and Illinois allow ballots to be received

late, in some cases up to 10 days after election day. The justice

department, at the prompting of the FVAP, has sued Pennsylvania to

extend its deadline by two weeks as well.

 

Nor will Americans find out how effectively the overseas vote has been

handled until " after the horses have left the barn, " says Joe

Smallhoover, legal counsel for Democrats Abroad. Voting reform passed

by Congress in 2002 requires states to track overseas ballots, at long

last. But more to the point, Smallhoover says: " We have to do more

than reform the FVAP; we have to reform the whole system. " Wright, the

military voting expert, agrees. He advocates placing the whole

overseas voting operation in the hands of the new Election Assistance

Commission, a far better-funded agency created by the 2002 Help

America Vote act that is supposed to help states improve their

equipment and procedures.

 

All this, however, lies in the future. In the meantime, Democrats

Abroad has formed a " rapid response " team to unsnarl problems voters

abroad have encountered with their county election officials.

Thousands of lawyers on both sides are renting office space in

battleground states, ready to pounce on illegalities in stateside

balloting and absentee votes. For now, overseas voters groping their

empty mailboxes can only download the write-in ballot, send it in - in

the faith that local election officials will accept it - and pray.

 

·Alix Christie is a reporter and former editor of the foreign service

of the San Francisco Chronicle

 

·This article has been provided by Salon through a special arrangement

with Guardian Newspapers Limited

 

© Salon.com 2004