You can forget about the impact of the military vote in the 2012 presidential elections. The reason: servicemembers aren’t applying for absentee ballots and the Pentagon isn’t doing much to help them.

“This is immensely disappointing,” said Eric Eversole, founder of the Military Voter Protection Project. “Election Day 2012 could result in an all-time historic low for military voter participation.”

Eversole’s group Tuesday released a report showing that applications by service members in states with high numbers of military residents is in the very low percentages. In Virginia, just 1,746 of 126,251 active military and their spouses, or 1.4 percent, have requested absentee ballots. In North Carolina, the percentage is 1.7 percent, in Alaska 5.9 percent, Ohio 3.3 percent.

And it’s a continuation of a bad trend. Eversole told Secrets that in 2008, 30 percent of the military voted. That dropped to 15 percent in 2010. By comparison, 60 percent of the general population voted in 2008 and 40 percent two years later