And so it begins... Military absentee ballots being rejected in VA

[5711-Marine]

McCain campaign says federal absentee ballot wrongly rejected
Fairfax County's registrar denies the allegation about the form, often used by overseas troops.

By PATRICK LYNCH | 247-4534
October 24, 2008

Virginia campaign officials for GOP presidential candidate John McCain are saying some Fairfax County absentee ballots — and possibly some in Hampton Roads — from overseas service members are being rejected over a technicality.

But the Fairfax registrar said he was following state law in rejecting a small number of absentee ballots that came in at the same time as the voter's application.

McCain's Virginia campaign officials called a news conference Thursday afternoon in Fairfax to say a specific absentee ballot — the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot — was being wrongly rejected in Fairfax, the state's largest locality, and possibly in other cities or counties.

The ballot is a sort of safety net for service members who aren't sure whether the state absentee ballot that they requested will make it to them in time.

One McCain campaign representative also said this might be happening in Arlington and Norfolk. But Norfolk Deputy Registrar John Merkel said it hadn't been a problem. He also said this was a rarely used absentee ballot and that Norfolk usually received a handful of them, at most.

Fairfax General Registrar Rokey Suleman said Thursday that he had had to reject some of the ballots because of a Virginia law passed in 2002. That law — then called Senate Bill 113, sponsored by then-state Sen. Bill Bolling — requires that when an overseas citizen wants to request an absentee ballot and cast a vote with the same paperwork, it requires not only a witness signature but the current address of the witness.

The McCain campaign said there's not even a space for the witness to list an address. Suleman agreed; he said that the federal document was changed in recent years and that the space for the witness address was removed. But the Virginia law hasn't changed.

Suleman said he brought up the issue last month at a Pew Foundation conference on overseas voting.

Now, he said, he's getting hammered by the McCain camp as someone trying to prevent service members from voting.

"I can't ignore the law," Suleman said. "I think it stinks."

It's not clear how many ballots might be affected. Suleman said that Fairfax received about 260 Federal Absentee Write-In Ballots and that he wasn't sure what percentage of those had to be rejected.

That compares with the 50,000 total absentee ballots Suleman expects to receive this year in Fairfax.

If anything, the issue surfacing is more proof of the scrapping by both presidential campaigns for every vote in a state where the most recent statewide election — Jim Webb versus then-U.S. Sen. George Allen — was decided by 10,000 votes. Some polls found Democrat Barack Obama up 10 points on McCain, but others found the race much closer. And Obama is battling 44 years of history in presidential voting patterns in the state.

The McCain campaign is likely to be extremely concerned about every military vote. A recent voluntary Military Times poll of several thousand subscribers found 68 percent of them supporting McCain to 23 percent for Obama.

[adymond]

But don't dare try and keep felons or those currently incarcerated from voting. That would be racial disenfranchisement.