Less than half of soldiers overseas had their votes successfully cast or counted

Above: A soldier registers to vote absentee at Forward Operating Base Warhorse near Baqubah last September.

Overseas military voters had less than half of their votes counted in last year’s congressional elections, according to data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Monday...

The figures, released at the commission’s annual conference on ways to improve and troubleshoot the absentee voting process, showed that only about 992,000 of the nearly 6 million eligible overseas citizens requested ballots for the 2006 general election.

That included about 119,000 military personnel stationed outside the United States. Of those, only about 57,000 — less than 48 percent — had their votes successfully cast or counted.

EAC officials said that’s roughly the same percentage that were counted for expatriates and domestic military filing absentee ballots. The major failures were on the ballot delivery side, with about 72 percent of those who failed to vote never receiving any of their requested election materials.

Read the rest at Stars and Stripes