Obama Administration Damages Military Voting Rights

There is something terribly wrong in America when our soldiers' voting rights are systematically destroyed under this administration.

These men and women are putting their lives on the line every day and dying in record numbers under Obama's crippling rules of engagement. And how does Obama thank them? By making sure their vote doesn't count. This is no accident.

J. Christian Adams was the heroic election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. He blew the lid off the Black Panther case of voter intimidation that Holder refused to prosecute.

The sabotage of the military vote is a high crime. I previously reported on Lema Bashir, the Palestinian stealth jihadist at Obama's Department of Justice. Lema Bashir was at the center of Virginia's failing to mail military ballots in time in 2008. The same mistakes were made again in 2010, and United States military voters were heavily disenfranchised because of in-actions by Bashir and DOJ throughout that year.

Disenfranchising the military vote is policy. You could make a case that bad mistakes were made in 2008, but that when those same mistakes are made and made worse in 2010 by a devout Muslim who calls Israel "northern Palestine," I submit that it is no accident but deliberate policy.

Obama's bumblers damage military voting rights By: J. Christian Adams | Washington Examiner | 07/13/11

Members of the armed services can visit a Pizza Hut on base in Iraq, but the Pentagon has failed to comply with a 2009 law requiring voter registration offices on every military installation.
A new report on military voting shows declining participation rates in the 2010 election despite an attempted congressional fix. Obama administration incompetence implementing the law is to blame.

Because service members have voted at historically low rates, Congress passed the MOVE Act in 2009. MOVE was supposed to cure impediments to voting by mandating absentee ballots mail overseas at least 45 days before election day. MOVE also required every military installation to have a voter registration office.

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Sadly, a new report shows the problem has only grown worse, no thanks to a lackadaisical Justice Department and a Pentagon with misplaced priorities.

The report by the Military Voter Protection Project and Chapman University's AMVET's clinic concludes that participation rates by uniformed service members actually declined in the 2010 election, despite the MOVE Act.

Data collected by congressional mandate reveal that only 4.6 percent of eligible military voters cast an absentee ballot that counted. In 2006, it was 5.5 percent. These numbers came despite the MOVE mandate of a voter registration office on every military installation before the November 2010 election.

Yet Defense Department political appointees waited until three weeks after the 2010 election to issue the order to establish the offices. Now six months before the start of presidential primaries, a quarter of military installations remain noncompliant with the legal obligation to have functioning voter registration offices.

Contrast the Pentagon slow-walk on military voting with the blitz to integrate gays into the armed services. No resource limitation interfered with forcing every member of the armed services to sit through hours of sensitivity training.

Perhaps too busy acclimating warriors to the new gay policy, the Pentagon bureaucracy continues to resist voter registration offices, particularly for Marine installations.

Helping service members vote isn't a priority of the Obama administration, especially before 2012. Even the Pentagon unit tasked with helping service members to vote (FVAP) is targeted for a 30 percent budget slash.

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Tomorrow, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., will hold a hearing to determine what went wrong at DOD in 2010. The inept enforcement efforts at Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department also merit scrutiny.

Helping felons restore their right to vote is a priority at the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Unfortunately, the infamous division also enforces the MOVE Act. It took DOJ an embarrassing nine months after MOVE passed to update its webpage with the new standards.

Until July 2010, DOJ actually publicized the weaker protections of the pre-MOVE law. The responsible bureaucrat allowed a memo seeking approval for website changes to gather dust for months.

At DOJ, encouraging felons to vote is more important than helping a Marine understand her new rights. DOJ ineptitude didn't end with a stale webpage. In February 2010, the same unhurried official told a convention of state election officials that litigation to enforce MOVE wasn't a priority of the Justice Department.

Read the rest.