Author Archives: ELECTIONLAWCENTER.COM

Discerning the Military Voting Problem at FVAP


This blog and the Washington Times have covered the news of the Department of Defense Inspector General Report about the fact that the Federal Voting Assistance Program has failed to comply with the MOVE Act’s command to make voter registration and information facilities available on all installations. (See also Tabella’s post FVAP Has Their Head in the Sand.) Half of all military installations have no such facilities according to the Inspector General’s report.  The MOVE Act was passed three years ago and appropriated $75,000,000 dollars for setting up these installation facilities.  Yet the task remains only halfway done.

There is possibly an easy cheap solution to solve the Pentagon’s failures to comply with the law.  Offering registration and voting information at base sign-in, whenever a servicemember reports to a new base and completes a stack of paperwork. 

An FVAP insider intimately familiar with internal operations provides this troubling insight to ELC, however, into an insular culture that doesn’t adapt easy, effective and obvious solutions.  The person tells us about the previous postings at this blog:



At least Bob [Carey, previous FVAP director] had a tiny sense of the outside-the-Pentagon world, having attempted a nonprofit of his own in Manhattan before joining FVAP.  Ms. Mitchell is pure, vintage Pentagon. Deny, distract and dismiss. . . .  Ms. Mitchell seems stuck in an alternate universe, a “that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it,” defense, in spite of the evidence. 


Again, investing all strategy in social media is a guaranteed fail, and sets DoD up for ridicule. They will end up hiring 10 young girls, paying them $100,000 a year to tweet and post things on Facebook. All you have to do is watch CNBC for an hour to hear the growing understanding the social media has limited effectiveness.


So there you have it.  How much money will the Pentagon spend on social media while at the same time military voting participation rates remain in the basement?

Arkansas Democrat Pleads Guilty in Voter Fraud Scheme


A Democratic state legislator from east Arkansas, his father and two campaign workers pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to commit election fraud after federal prosecutors said they bribed absentee voters and destroyed ballots in a special election last year.

“In a nation in which every person’s vote matters, protecting the integrity of the electoral process from those who seek to win office by cheating the system is critical,” U.S. Attorney Jane Duke said in a statement released by her office. “Voter fraud schemes such as that carried out in the 2011 District 54 race have the devastating effect of eroding public confidence in elected officials and disenfranchising voters.”


 


Full story here.


More Sasquatch Sightings in Florida aka Voter Fraud


Miami Herald:


Del Pino is among more than a dozen people interviewed by police investigating ballot-broker Deisy Cabrera, who is facing a felony vote fraud charge and two misdemeanor counts of illegal ballot possession. Prosecutors on Wednesday released police reports from interviews with Del Pino and 16 other voters whose ballots Cabrera, a so-called boletera, is accused of collecting before the Aug. 14 primary election.


The most serious charge Cabrera faces is a felony count for allegedly forging the signature of 81-year-old Zulema Gomez, who lies unresponsive from a brain tumor in a Miami Springs nursing home. Cabrera has pleaded not guilty.

Here is the Sasquatch reference. 



Military Voting Mess 2012

Because you might not see it at other blogs, here is the link to the story on the DOD Inspector General’s report finding that the Department of Defense has failed to comply with federal law requiring military installations to provide voter registration services.  Congress authorized $75 million to ensure that this happened by 2012, but the head of the Pentagon office responsible, Pam Mitchell (photo below), said there wasn’t enough funding.


Congress is set to hold hearings where we may find out if this was deliberate Obama adminstration policy to ignore federal law when it comes to military voters, or, gross incompetence by Mitchell’s FVAP shop.  Stay tuned.   It’s starting to feel like 2010 all over again.

FVAP has its head in the sand on military voting issues.

The Washington Times quotes the interim Director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program on the state of military voting.

“I strongly believe that voting assistance is the best that it has ever been,”Pam Mitchell said at a Pentagon briefing.

Mr. Eversole disputed her remarks.

“She may believe that, but data from the states shows otherwise,” he said.

A
report last month from the Military Voter Protection Project found that
military requests for absentee ballots were lower than in 2008 in key
swing states like Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. In those three
states fewer than 2 percent of eligible military voters had requested
absentee ballots, the report found.

Never. Been. Better.



Updated on NH Voter ID Preclearance

More at PJ Tatler:


“Any doubt about the duplicitous nature of the New Hampshire preclearance vanishes when we learn who the lawyers were representing New Hampshire’s efforts to have Voter ID precleared – two left leaning lawyers who have opposed voter ID elsewhere. Consider Gerry Hebert. Hebert’s history of being involved in cases where courts have sanctioned the lawyers has been profiled by Hans von Spakovsky in “An Unconscionable Speaker.” In the Texas Voter ID case, Hebert argued that Voter ID is a racially motivated voter suppression tool.



J. Gerald Hebert, a well-known civil rights lawyer representing those intervening in the case, argued during his closing that the threat of voter fraud was “merely a pretext, a cloak” for a voter suppression effort and that Texas’ effort had been “tinged with race from day one.” He asked the court make an affirmative finding that the law was enacted with a discriminatory purpose.”