Following the Washington Examiner’s explosive article on the alleged “Cooking of the Military Voting Books,” we find this independent analysis of the DOD-FVAP survey conducted by the Military Voting Protection Project (MVPP), a non-partisan military voting rights organization.  The analysis starts to deconstruct and reverse-engineer the slanted numbers crunching.  Due to its length, I have only posted Part I of this analysis. 

The MVPP update ends with the conclusion: “At the end of the day, there is simply no tangible evidence from the states supporting FVAP’s conclusions and it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the survey.”

Part I:  More importantly, the 2010 data (which is drastically improved) does not support the absentee military voting rates claimed by FVAP.  According to FVAP, 29% of 1.4 million active duty military members voted in 2010 and 67% (that is, 272,000 military members) voted by absentee ballot.  FVAP also claims that 34% of 1.1 million military spouses voted in 2010 and that 40% of those spouses (approximately 150,000) voted by absentee ballot.  Taken together, these totals suggest that 425,000 military members and their spouses voted by absentee ballot in 2010.  Of course, if this were true, it would mean that the EAC state data, which reported about 108,000 returned absentee ballots from military voters in 2010, misses the mark by more than 300,000 absentee military ballots.  That is simply unbelievable.

Nor can the disparity between FVAP’s and the EAC’s data be overcome by the reasons provided by FVAP.  FVAP argues that state officials make two errors that impact the total reported to the EAC: (1) some local jurisdictions do not respond to the EAC’s survey; and (2) local election officials only count military voters as UOCAVA voters when they submit a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA).

With respect to the first point, it is true that some jurisdictions fail to report data.  However, as noted above, the instances of non-reporting have decreased dramatically since 2008.  The amount of non-reporting in 2010 appears to be relatively small and, at best, would only move the needle by a few percentage points.  It certainly wouldn’t account for 300,000 missing ballots.