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. 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?
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:
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. 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?
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: