May 10, 2012
MADISON — In upholding the Wisconsin Constitution, election officials are being forced to break the law.
“As you are all well aware, the condensed timing between the recall primary and recall election makes adherence to the statutory dates governing absentee ballot availability impossible to achieve,” Nat Robinson, the Government Accountability Board’s elections division administrator, wrote in a letter to county and municipal clerks Monday. “However, we must make a concerted effort to have ballots available as soon as we possibly can.”
Read more at WisconsinReporter.com
April 18, 2012
Voting Wrongs: Oversight of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Enforcement
April 18, 2012
Click here to read Eric Eversole’s testimony.
April 18, 2012
Our men and women in uniform are entitled to have their votes count and be counted, unfortunately for a long time this has not been the case. Eric Eversole the leader of a group called the Military Voter Protection Project talks about Ground Hog Day experience where each election our troops find out their ballots didn’t make it in time to be counted. Eversole points out that it has become increasingly difficult for our men and women in uniform to vote.
Read more at Secure Freedom Radio
April 17, 2012
Obama Justice Department excuses failure to deliver ballots to troops
By Eric Eversole Monday, April 16, 2012
Military voters must feel like Bill Murray’s character in GroundhogDay. Election after election, certain state and local election officials fail to meet the deadline for sending absentee ballots. The outcome is often the same – thousands of ballots are received too close to the election to be returned or, if they are returned, the ballots arrive after the deadline to be counted. In either case, the military voter is disenfranchised.
April 2, 2012
By Kirsten Adshead | Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON — Democracy — its pursuit, its protection, its implementation — is at the heart of why members of the U.S. military serve.
Systemic failures in Wisconsin’s elections system, however, may be costing service members an integral role in democracy back home: their votes.
“I’m extremely disappointed that we haven’t come up with a good, solid system yet that makes it easy for military voters to vote absentee,” said Don Eggert, a member of the U.S. Army National Guard who is stationed in Germany and has served in Iraq and Kosovo as well. “It should be simple and yet, somehow, it is not.”
…That’s not enough, said Eric Eversole, executive director of the nonprofit Military Voter Protection Project.
(more…)
March 9, 2012
LAW REVIEW 1225
March 2012
Federal Court Order Protects Military Voting Rights in New York
By Captain Samuel F. Wright, JAGC, USN (Ret.)
7.0—Military Voting Rights
United States v. State of New York, Civil Action No. 1:10-cv-1214 (N.D.N.Y. Jan. 27, 2012).
Under a federal law that was amended in 2009, local election officials (LEOs)[1] must have absentee ballots printed and ready to mail by the 45th day before any primary or election for federal office, so that military personnel will have sufficient time to receive their ballots, mark them, and return them on time to be counted, no matter where the service of our country has taken them. Readers: Please contact your LEO and the LEOs in several surrounding counties to remind them of this requirement and to monitor their compliance. If you find that a LEO has missed the 45-day requirement for whatever reason, please send an e-mail to Bob Carey, the Director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) in DOD. His e-mail is Bob.Carey@fvap.gov. Please copy me, at SWright@roa.org.
For my entire professional career, since I graduated from law school and passed the Texas bar exam in 1976, I have made the protection of the rights of those who serve in our armed forces the principal focus of my life. In the immediate aftermath of the 1976 general election, just days after I received my bar exam results and was sworn in as a lawyer, I represented a client who was a freshman Congressman who had just been elected to Congress in a special election six months earlier. He very narrowly lost the 1976 general election, and along with a much more senior lawyer I represented him in the recount and election contest. That Congressman was Ron Paul—yes, the same guy who is now running for President.
In 2009, Congress enacted the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE Act), which amended UOCAVA in several important ways. The most important 2009 amendment was the addition of an explicit statutory requirement that each state must mail out ballots to UOCAVA voters by the 45thday prior to Election Day.
Read more at ServiceMembers-LawCenter.org
December 30, 2011
By QUIN HILLYER on 12.30.11 @ 6:09AM
It’s a sad commentary on the Obama administration both that the Republican effort to dethrone him seems so desperately important that it dominated (my) column-writing in the year before election year and that the administration flouts laws and constitutional traditions in so many ways that it’s almost impossible to blow the whistle on them all. That said, I have been seriously amiss in writing too little in 2011 on the following stories, some of which I covered at length in previous years — and all of which I enthusiastically invite other reporters and columnists to write about.
The Obamite Effort to Discourage Voting by the Military:Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, came on my radio show in September to discuss this, but it still merits far more attention. Clearly, the Obama administration has, at best, fallen down on the job, and more likely, activelydiscouraged military voting. Clearly, they believe military voters tend to be conservative, so the Obamites want them disenfranchised.
Read more at Spectator.org
October 22, 2011
By Sean Wardwell and Colleen Flaherty
Killeen Daily Herald
Former 1st Sgt. Kenneth Dwanye Patrick was a busy man three years ago.
He returned in January from his third deployment to Iraq with 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, and focused on reintegrating his soldiers while personally navigating the channels of retirement and trying to secure civilian employment.
As the months passed in 2008, newly retired Patrick’s life slowed down enough for him to become engaged in politics. Never previously politically inclined, he wanted to cast his ballot in the presidential election that November. But he was turned away at the polls. Election officials said he wasn’t a registered voter.
“The military has given us tools,” Patrick said. “It’s up to the individual soldier to utilize those resources.”
Read more at KDHNews.com
October 20, 2011
Following up on this post, I received the following response via email from Eric Eversole, who is the Executive Director of the Military Voter Protection Project and Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at Chapman University. It raises questions about the accuracy of the FVAP data. (Of course, I would be very interested in posting any response from FVAP)…
Read more at ElectionLawBlog.org
September 7, 2011
By Hans A. von Spakovsky and Eric Eversole
Published September 07, 2011
Time and again, Eric Holder’s Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division has shown how highly partisan it is. From its dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, to its harassment of jurisdictions with voter ID laws, the Division has proven that its far-left liberal ideology determines whether it will enforce (or not enforce) the law. Now it is ignoring the plight of military voters.
The Division once again revealed its true colors in several recent cases to enforce the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (Motor Voter). Keep in mind that in 2009, shortly after the Obama administration took over, the Division dismissed (without explanation) a lawsuit filed by the Bush administration against Missouri under Motor Voter because the state was not removing from its registration rolls voters who had died or moved away.
Clearly, President Obama and Assistant Attorney General Perez have a different definition of “all” than most Americans do.
Read more at FoxNews.com
