To help protect military votes and ensure those votes are counted, Congress should work to solve problems presented in the September 2007 Election Assistance Commission (EAC) report on military and overseas absentee voting. That is why I recently introduced the Military Voting Protection Act of 2008 (MVP Act) with Ranking Member Ehlers and Congressman Lungren, who joined as original co-sponsors.

According to the report, a major “reason for rejected ballots was that they were received by the election offices after the deadline stipulated by State law.” The EAC’s findings also suggested that roughly 10% of all uncounted military and overseas absentee ballots were rejected because they were received past deadline.

As you can imagine, my colleagues and I were shocked and extremely disappointed to learn that the brave military men and women serving to protect our constitutional rights were being denied their constitutional right to vote. The MVP Act provides a much needed, common-sense safeguard that ensures military personnel serving this country are not erroneously left out of the election process. The bill seeks to expedite collection and delivery of overseas uniformed service-member’s ballots. It also establishes procedures for the collection, transportation, and tracking of the absentee ballots of overseas uniformed services voters to ensure that such ballots are delivered to state election officials by the local jurisdiction’s statutory deadline, while safeguarding voter privacy and ballot secrecy. I urge my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, to join our effort of working to ensure our military men and women’s votes are counted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Politics .