519,000 ballots cast by overseas troops - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

519,000 ballots cast by overseas troops

The Military Postal Service Agency had returned 519,032 overseas absentee ballots to local election offices as of Nov. 4, more than 2½ times the total of 203,233 returned in the 2004 election, officials said.

MPSA delivered 415,428 absentee ballots to APO and FPO addresses between Sept. 8 and Nov. 4, said Shari Lawrence, Army Human Resources Command spokeswoman, more than twice the total of 205,418 sent out in the same time period in 2004.

Some people were able to get ballots electronically, depending on the state. That’s why nearly 105,000 more ballots were received by local election officials this year than were mailed through the military postal system to APO/FPO addresses.

Also, an estimated 10,000 overseas voters sent ballots by FedEx under a partnership with the Overseas Vote Foundation and the express shipper, which offered free or discounted delivery of ballots from 89 countries. No problems were reported with the mail aspect of the voting through Nov. 4 by either MPSA or the Federal Voting Assistance Program, said Yvonne Yoerger, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service.

The number of absentee ballots sent to local election offices is just one part of the equation. Officials at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission now will analyze and report on how many of the ballots actually were counted, said Matthew Weil, research program specialist at the commission.

The report, a requirement of the Help America Vote Act, will be done in the fall of 2009. States have 60 days from the election to get their data to the commission.

While OVF and the Federal Voting Assistance Program have worked to make it easier to vote absentee from overseas, plenty of problems still exist, partly because of disparities in policies and procedures among local election districts.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, head of the Overseas Vote Foundation, said it’s still impossible for voters to tell if they’re going to get their ballot on time, or if it’s going to make it back to local elections officials.

She said she has heard from a number of people who requested, received, filled out and sent in their ballots in plenty of time, but they never made it to the local election office.

On the other hand, she acknowledged, “A lot of voters are writing and saying, ‘Yes, I voted, I voted on time and it was easy.’ ”

The OVF Web site averaged 48,600 daily visitors in October. What surprised her, she said, was the traffic on Nov. 3 and 4 from people in the U.S., not overseas.

“It was a shock,” she said. “At 9 a.m. Eastern [time] on both days, the Internet went nuts.”

About 20 percent of questions to the help desk those days were from service members, she said. The site has a comprehensive list of local election officials, which is helpful to those in the U.S. as well as overseas, she said.