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Troop ballot law has states in a time squeeze

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A new law meant to protect the voting rights of deployed troops and other Americans overseas is forcing at least a dozen states to consider holding their primaries earlier or to negotiate another plan that federal officials will accept.

Ballots must be sent to certain voters at least 45 days before an election under a requirement included in a major defense bill signed Wednesday by President Barack Obama. It leaves states with 2010 primaries in August and September in a pickle because the deadline for distributing November ballots will pass by the time many certify the results of the primary.

“You can’t print a ballot until you know who won,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who is urging his state’s lawmakers to shift the Sept. 14 primary by at least a month. “And you can’t print ballots in five seconds. It takes several days to print a ballot. Then you have to put them in the mail.”

Some states have said they may seek a waiver to avoid moving their elections. Though faxing and e-mailing ballots to overseas voters might be one workaround, one congressman who supports the deadline said the goal should be to keep standards as uniform as possible.

“What I think election officials across the country certainly need to realize is we need to make sure that those who are fighting in defense of our freedom have the ability to exercise the greatest freedom Americans enjoy, and that is the right to vote,” said Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo.

Vermont’s top election official, like Ritchie, is urging that her state’s primary be moved earlier. Other states with September primaries include Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Even states with mid-August elections, Colorado and Washington among them, are worried about a time squeeze.

Colorado, New York, Washington and Wisconsin are among states already planning to request waivers.

Sending ballots overseas and back takes time. For military members in particular, Coffman and fellow advocates describe a mail delivery maze that can chew up a month each way as items go from port to port and then compete with food, bullets and supplies in convoys headed to forward operating bases.

In January, the Pew Center on the States identified shortcomings with the turnaround of military and overseas ballots in 25 states. The report said states mailed them out anywhere from 21 to 60 days before an election and found it routinely takes several weeks to get them back — sometimes too late to be counted.

In 2006, nearly 1 million of those ballots were requested but only about one-third were cast or counted, according to a federal study.

Coffman has seen the issue from both sides, as a secretary of state for Colorado and as a Marine who hit snags when trying to cast a ballot while deployed in Iraq. Coffman said he wasn’t able to get an absentee ballot in 2005 because at the time, his home state didn’t permit scanned ballot applications by e-mail.

The new law affects 1.4 million military members and their 400,000 voting-age dependents, said Bob Carey, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program. Many more embassy workers, contractors and other Americans living abroad would also be affected.

Carey will consider exemption requests from states that don’t want to shift their primaries, decisions he’ll make in consultation with the U.S. attorney general. He declined to say specifically what a successful application might look like.

“A state has to show it has a proper plan in place to ensure that military and overseas voters are given proper time,” Carey said.

Those that don’t move up primaries or get a waiver could be subject to enforcement actions by the Department of Justice to get them to comply.

According to the Pew study, 19 states allow for fax and e-mail transmission of ballots to and from voters. Some also provide blank, write-in ballots as a backup. The new law demands that states adopt at least one electronic method of getting voting documents to military and overseas voters.

But complying with the 45-day window is causing the most strain for states.

Katie Blinn, an election official in Washington state, said the law fails to take into account that some states already build in a grace period for overseas ballots that come in after Election Day. Blinn’s state, for example, counts ballots that come in up to three weeks after the general election as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

That more than accounts for the 45-day goal, yet Washington state — with next year’s primary set for Aug. 17 — wouldn’t get its ballots out soon enough under the law because it takes weeks to certify the primary results.

“Our system of allowing people to delay voting until closer to Election Day is better in terms of making an informed choice,” Blinn said.

In Wisconsin, which has a 10-day post-election grace period and extends other options to military voters, there has been little appetite for holding the primary earlier than the traditional September time. Reid Magney, a spokesman for the board that oversees elections, said it would conflict with a state culture where summer getaways are sacred and politics is put on the back burner.

“Things just don’t get going here until September,” Magney said.

There is concern that summer primaries could depress turnout for elections that already draw relatively few voters, although voting experts couldn’t point to research on a participation dropoff.

Vermont Secretary of State Deb Markowitz conceded that August is a sleepy time for politics. But she sees a moved-up primary as the best way to serve deployed troops.

“Old habits die hard and a September primary certainly is our tradition,” Markowitz said. “I strongly believe that if we made a change to August, politicians would adapt, voters would adapt.”

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Associated Press Writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; Mike Gormley in Albany, N.Y.; Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Wash.; and Kristen Wyatt in Denver contributed to this report.