Military Times:

U.S. service members deserve to cast a paper ballot on election night.

That’s the premise behind a $6.8 million research effort headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to develop technology that could change the voting game for troops stationed far from home and even deployed to remote locations.…

The problem, as presenters outlined it, was clear: For troops and family members, voting looks and feels very different than it does for most Americans. They mail an absentee ballot that may look unlike the one used in their state or local voting region, and won’t get counted until an audit period some time after the projected winners have all been announced.

And that difference in experience and perception directly translates to voting participation: According to information presented by VotingWorks, military voters have an average turnout of 47%, compared to 74% for civilians. Polling data presented underscores the part that voting challenges play in nonparticipation.

Some 54% of surveyed military members who wanted to vote but didn’t said they had trouble requesting an absentee ballot, and another 43% said the ballot never arrived at all. Other reasons for not voting included a too-complicated voting process, difficulty with the mailing system, and trouble accessing their state’s election website.

This remains a serious problem, more than 60 years after the Supreme Court threw out a Texas constitutional provision that denied military voters the right to vote (as I write about in A Real Right to Vote).

Delaware Valley Journal:

A local citizens group advocating for election integrity filed a complaint Tuesday with an administrative law judge claiming the Pennsylvania Department of State is violating federal election law at the behest of progressive nonprofit groups.

At issue are thousands of overseas ballots from nonmilitary people, who may or may not be U.S. citizens or former Pennsylvania residents.

At a virtual press conference, lawyers representing a group called PA Fair Elections said federal election law does require nonmilitary overseas voters to provide identification, such as a copy of their driver’s license or Social Security card, to vote. While military members are not required to show ID, other overseas voters are under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).

LAT. [corrected link]

Here is a military spouse who the Trump campaign has baselessly accused of committing voter fraud in a Nevada lawsuit. When Christian Adams’ PILF made similar accusations calling legal voters “aliens,” they got sued and Adams had to apologize to settle the case.

News 3 Las Vegas:

Should Nevada residents who are serving overseas in the military be allowed to vote?

Both federal and local laws say yes, but a letter sent to the Department of Justice by a lawyer representing the Donald Trump campaign doesn’t think so.

Attorney Shana D. Weir, representing Donald J. Trump for President Inc., sent a letter to United States Attorney General William Barr on Thursday claiming to have evidence of “criminal voter fraud” in the state of Nevada.

Specifically, they have a list of 3,062 voters who voted in the 2020 presidential election, even though the National Change of Address database shows have moved out of Nevada….

The list provided by Weir gives no way of telling how long these voters have been out of town, and how many are in college. However, the data shows something telling — many of the votes that Weir claims to be fraudulent have overseas military addresses.

To be specific, 132 of the out-of-town addresses listed have Army Post Office addresses — addresses used for active service Army and Air Force personnel serving overseas….

Task & Purpose:

Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have extended deadlines for military voters to account for the delays facing overseas ballots.

“Each state establishes clear absentee ballot deadlines, including some extended deadlines for military and overseas citizens to return their ballots after postmarking their ballots by election day,” Lisa Lawrence, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told Task & Purpose. “All ballots that are timely received, pursuant to state law, will be considered by election officials for either acceptance or rejection.”…

“Federal law protects military and overseas voters and many states give extra time for military ballots to arrive and be counted,” Richard Hasen, a professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California-Irvine, told Task & Purpose. “No state has a final or official count on election night; the full counting takes days or weeks. It is true that races are sometimes unofficially called by news organizations on election night or soon thereafter, but those are just predictions of what the official count will likely show.”

“Trump’s calls to stop counting on election night, if followed, would disenfranchise military voters allowed to vote under state and federal law,” Hasen said. “Fortunately, the president has no role to play in dictating which ballots are counted and when.”

That decision is up to the states.

“Traditionally most states even if they are in-hand states, where the ballots have to be in at the close of the polls, have a specific carved out allowance for military and overseas voters to have their ballots come in after the fact,” Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor with the Democracy Fund, told Task & Purpose.

But for voters, it’s growing increasingly difficult to keep up to date on exactly what the rules are, even as the election looms around the corner.

HuffPost:

President Donald Trump, in social media posts and remarks, is demanding that all ballots be counted by election night, even though federal law permits states to count ballots from troops stationed outside the United States, diplomats and other Americans abroad to have their ballots counted days later, as long as they were sent no later than Election Day.

In Trump’s new home state of Florida, the deadline for this election is Nov. 13. So, for example, his attempt to skew the counting in his favor could prevent service members deployed overseas from the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville or from Southern Command headquarters in Doral from having their votes matter.

David Beirne, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, at Electionline.

Strange story:

In a conference call Friday, House Democratic Caucus Executive Director Trent Armitage said that 55 military ballots delivered to the Stafford County registrar’s post office box on Tuesday—Election Day—went uncounted because they were not picked up until Wednesday. Democrats said they had no way of knowing which candidates the 55 votes went for, but the ballots arrived on time and came from active-duty military personnel.

“We find that to be absolutely ridiculous,” Armitage said.

Stafford Supervisor Laura Sellers, a Democrat, lost her Garrisonville District seat to Republican Mark Dudenhefer by just 15 votes. And Republican Bob Thomas holds an 83-vote lead over Democrat Joshua Cole in the race for the 28th District House of Delegates seat representing parts of Fredericksburg and Stafford.

U.S. Vote Foundation:

Rarely does the first iteration of a law translate legislative intent into implementation flawlessly and durably. The legislative process allows us to correct, improve or update laws as needed in our changing times. It’s an ongoing process, and one we should embrace!

A new round of legislative reform is needed to ensure that the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) and its progeny continue to play a vital role. In 2009, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE) was passed as a much-needed, bipartisan reform to UOCAVA; and it has served as a mechanism to modernize key aspects of UOCAVA. The MOVE Act’s creation was informed by years of research, including work by U.S. Vote Foundation’s (US Vote) Overseas Vote initiative (formerly Overseas Vote Foundation), and it has been demonstrably successful in accelerating the transition to online methods for most overseas and military voting processes across all states.