The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky along with Eric Eversole release this report on military voting rights.  “The MOVE Act, like previous voting rights laws, was supposed to help military members exercise their right to vote. The MOVE Act, however, cannot succeed in delivering on its promise until it is fully implemented and enforced. President Obama has a clear opportunity to help deliver the promise of the MOVE Act, but his Administration must be willing to make the issue a priority. It must address the shortcomings from the 2010 election and ensure a top-down commitment from the President’s agencies to promote and protect U.S. service members’ voting rights. At a time when members of America’s military are in harm’s way in remote parts of the world, this nation should spare no expense or effort in making sure that the MOVE Act’s promise is realized.”

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To make matters worse, the Voting Section once again appeared to be unwilling or unprepared to enforce the MOVE Act aggressively. From day one, the Voting Section appeared to drag its feet when implementing the new law and lacked a clear strategy to enforce it.[17] For nearly a year, the Voting Section and DOD promised to provide states with detailed implementation guidance on the MOVE Act, but that guidance never came, and the states were forced to guess how the Voting Section would enforce the new law. This failure left several states with no choice but to file last-minute waiver applications and, when DOD denied half of those applications, caused a rash of last-minute litigation on the eve of the election.[18]

More problematic was the Voting Section’s attempt to dispose of waiver cases by advising jurisdictions that it was permissible to send federal-only ballots to military voters—that is, a ballot that contains federal races, but not state or local races.[19] This federal-only ballot presumably would allow the state to meet the strict requirements of UOCAVA (which applies only to federal elections) but would affect the military voter’s right to vote in state and local races and could lead to other violations of the law.[20] In Maryland, for example, a federal judge found a violation of a military member’s fundamental right to vote in state and local elections when Maryland sent federal-only ballots, based on ill-advised guidance from the Voting Section, during the 2010 election.