At a recent OVF summit, C-SPAN captured a spirited and sharp debate over the state of military voting.  While Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) Director Bob Carey asserts that overall progress is being made, another panelist Candice Miller reminded the audience that 29% of those responding to the survey failed to receive their ballot in time and were disenfranchised. 

Heritage Foundation Scholar Hans Von Spakovsky threw cool water (17m56s) on the unusually rosy report released by the FVAP pointing out the criticism by government auditors.  The FVAP report was based on a Department of Defense (DOD) survey of military voters that has been repeatedly criticized by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and viewed by observers as more optimistic than the Election Assistance Survey (EAC) survey which collects data directly from the states and reflects voting participation rates among overseas and military voters as unusually low.  Carey responded that the EAC and DOD findings are actually more similar than critics allege. The GAO criticized the Pentagon survey as having a non-response biased analysis which limited the data reliability. 

Spakovsky also criticized the slow implementation of DOD to meet the federal requirement that installations identify voting registration offices for updating registration addresses of military service members.  Jocelyn Benson and other panelists identified the mobility of servicemembers and logistical barriers (including slow mail delivery service) which social media and the increased use of electronic transmission of ballots may help overcome. 

 American Thinker:

“Violations of the voting process depicted in Adams’ book are manifold and include incompetence, fraud, partisanship, and intimidation or thuggery. These rampant and pervasive problems warrant serious interventions to curb abuses of a right Americans hold sacrosanct. Fortunately, citizens’ groups are becoming more involved in elections and have recognized the need to do more to protect the rights of the electorate under the law.”

At National Review:

“As a black man, I say, ‘Power to Holder!’ I just hope this brave public servant can find the time to fight all the racists who are imposing on blacks, and everyone else, the extreme indignity of showing ID cards. This undue burden parallels the colored water fountains and lunch counters that vanished 48 years ago.  . . . 

A bunch of racists at the Justice Department expect blacks, and everybody else, to show picture ID. Justice’s website repeatedly states: “Photo ID is required to clear security at all locations.” As Jeff Aronson observed in the New York Post: “Before a citizen can enter the US Department of Justice’s office to complain about the need to produce a photo ID before voting, that citizen will need to produce a photo ID to gain entry.”

Here is the DOJ’s late Friday night filing with the court noting the full retreat on Kinston.  DOJ suggests that there was a massive shift in black election turnout between 2009 and 2011, and pigs fly.  Of course, as Hans von Spakovsky has astutely noted in his Corner post the other day, the 65% black share of the VAP was the same in 2009 and 2011. This is a thinly veiled effort to avoid having Section 5 struck down on the basis of an embarrassingly deficient objection cooked up by Loretta King. One wonders how many more messes of hers AAG Tome Perez will have to clean up in the months ahead.

Waynesboro  (Tennessee) made history Tuesday by holding the first election since Tennessee’s voter photo identification law went into effect. Although
there are some exceptions, the law generally requires voters to show
valid photo identification before casting their ballots.
full story here. 

No meltdown as the photo ID opponents in Tennessee had predicted.

Politicians in Missouri have been debating the need for a voter ID requirement for decades and this is the seventh time in eight years it has been brought up in the legislature.

The Missouri Supreme Court six years ago ruled that it was unconstitutional and Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed last year’s attempt. A constitutional amendment is on the ballot for November.

details here.

RNLA tweets from CPAC here.  Conservatives are not big fans of DOD’s implementation of the MOVE Act.

Senator Cornyn will state that the Department of Justice has been led by “an arrogant, incompetent, dangerously ideological, and transparently political Attorney General.

Link

Story here. 

In a decision handed down today, U.S. District Court Judge Gary Sharpe is
once again disappointed in how New York is handling its elections
process when it comes to overseas and military voters.

…Sharpe’s ruling last month required the state Board of Elections to
submit an elections calendar. However, the agency submitted two—one from
the Democratic officials and one from Republicans.

“New York has once again demonstrated its intransigent refusal
to comply with a federal mandate protecting the federal voting rights of
those serving in the military overseas and those otherwise living on
foreign soil,” Sharpe wrote in today’s decision.

The colorful Sharpe noted in his ruling that the submissions “remind
the court of Strother Martin’s (Captain, Florida Road Prison 36)
admonition to Paul Newman (Prisoner Luke): “What we’ve got here is a
failure to communicate.” The dialogue is from the 1967 movie “Cool Hand
Luke.”

full story here.