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NY service members don't have ballotsShannon Ross Posted by: Emily Lenihan Updated: Monday, 11 Oct 2010, 8:55 AM EDT BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Only 22 days remain until Election Day, and more than 300,000 New York service members and overseas voters still don't have their absentee ballots. Fox News reports that Albany has failed to send the ballots to military voters more than one week after the deadline, a violation of the "Move" Act.

When ballots of our troops serving overseas were trashed in the 2000 election, it was a disgrace that we hoped would never be repeated. If all the military votes had been counted, the Florida result might not have been so close, and the nation might not have had to wait weeks to discover who our new president would be. Now we are engaged in a war, and our troops are risking death and disability daily. We not only hope that their right to vote will be respected − we demand it. But in a severe case of déjà vu, once...

The failure of military ballots to be mailed out in a timely manner during the 2008 election inspired Congress to enact legislation requiring a minimum of 45 days between the mailing of ballots and election day. It was believed that this would provide enough time for most overseas troops to cast votes that could be counted. The Obama dministration, however, just granted an exemption to the state of Wisconsin—allowing military ballots to be sent only 32 days prior to election day. Attorney General Eric Holder defended the exemption calling the “effort of state election officials to conduct elections as they...

HAWLEY, Mass., March 23 (UPI) -- Officials in a small Massachusetts town said a deadline passed without a single resident filing to run in the May 3 election. Hawley Town Clerk Cyndie Stetson, 62, who also serves as a justice of the peace and a notary in addition to substitute teaching, said the March 15 deadline passed without anyone submitting the required 25 signatures to run for positions including selectmen and a tree warden in the town of 336 residents, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday. Stetson said the town will vote write-in only May 3, with candidates needing at least...

Coakley Campaign To Sound Alarm On Reported Ballots Pre-Marked For Scott BrownEric Kleefeld | January 19, 2010, 5:34PM The Martha Coakley campaign just sent out a media advisory, announcing a press conference at 5:30 p.m. ET, alleging irregularities in the special Senate election. The press conference will involve reports of voters who received ballots that were already marked for Republican candidate Scott Brown. It should be noted that the Coakley campaign will have on hand as an attorney one Marc Elias, who was previously the head recount lawyer for Al Franken in Minnesota, a legal drama that lasted for eight...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2010 – Servicemembers and overseas voters shouldn’t assume they automatically will receive ballots for the 2010 elections just because they have in the past. Previously, voters would receive absentee ballots for up to two cycles following their request, Bob Carey, Federal Voting Assistance Program director, said yesterday during the 2010 election year kick-off. He said new laws require voters to submit federal postcard applications for absentee ballots on a yearly basis. In the coming months, Carey and his team will travel worldwide to train voting assistance officers at embassies, consulates and overseas military facilities to ensure voters...

Afghanistan election run-off will be logistical nightmareGrowing Taliban power, inaccessible terrain and non-existent infrastructure makes the Afghan run-off a huge logistical challenge. By Ben Farmer in Kabul Published: 9:22PM BST 20 Oct 2009 A fleet of 3,500 trucks will be needed to carry voting materials to the polling stations and 3,000 donkeys to get people to remote areas. Afghanistan's 94,000 soldiers and 84,000 police, backed by 100,000 Nato-led forces, will be on duty to protect polling stations, but hundreds more will be judged too dangerous to open. Around 6,500 polling stations were opened for the Aug 20 poll, but many...

Some scholars squabble about the particulars, but there is no question that democracy's roots go back at least 2,500 years to practices developed in the Greek city-state of Athens. But the adoption of a key pillar of democracy — the secret ballot — came far more recently. In England in the 1830s, disenfranchised working-class men and sympathetic members of Parliament launched the Chartist movement. The most crucial of its six objectives was universal suffrage for all men over 21, but not far behind was the secret-ballot provision. It took decades, but eventually the secret ballot became the democratic norm —...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – The judges in the Minnesota Senate trial have identified the first of what could be many wrongly rejected absentee ballots that they say must be included in the final count. The judges' order Tuesday means that 24 supporters of Democrat Al Franken whose absentee ballots were rejected will see their votes counted. Republican Norm Coleman wants the judges to count about 4,700 other rejected absentee ballots, and his lawyer says their decision means they're more likely to take that step. Franken has a 225-vote lead over Coleman, not including the 24 votes at issue Tuesday.

In a ruling that keeps alive Republican Norm Coleman's chances of overturning Minnesota's U.S. Senate recount, a three-judge panel on Tuesday allowed him to bring evidence to trial that as many as 4,800 absentee ballots were wrongly rejected and should now be counted. The decision expands the evidence that can be considered in the recount trial

Master Sgt. Louis Carter, 321st Air Expeditionary Airlift Squadron combat aviation advisor, performs a pre-flight inspection on an Iraqi C-130E here Feb. 2. The C-130 was one of two aircraft on its way to pick up Iraqi election ballot boxes. Sergeant Carter is deployed from the 550th Special Operations Squadron at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. Photo by Staff Sgt. Tim Beckham. SATHER AIR BASE — Members from the 321st Air Expeditionary Airlift Squadron did their part in assisting Iraq in the election process Feb. 2. While many service members were watching the final moments of Superbowl XLIII, Maj. Scott...

Minnesota State Canvassing Board review of challenged ballots in the U.S. Senate race HERE

Tomorrow the Canvassing Board presiding over the recount convenes to consider challenged ballots that were excluded because of their disputed status from the recount. At the urging of the Canvassing Board, both the Coleman and Franken campaigns are reducing the number of ballots they have challenged. The Canvassing Board consists of Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie -- the Man from ACORN and George Soros -- and four judges (including Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson). Last week the Canvassing Board unanimously adopted Al Franken's playbook for the recount, taking action that threatens...

(ABC 6 NEWS) -- We're nearing the end of the historic Senate recount between Senator Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken. Election officials are now turning their focus to the absentee ballots. Starting this morning, volunteers will begin to count how many absentee ballots were wrongly rejected due to an administrative error. Then it will be up the state canvassing board to decide whether or not to include those ballots into the recount. The board is scheduled to meet on Friday. For the moment, Coleman leads Franken by 687 votes.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio Supreme Court on Friday threw out about 1,000 provisional ballots that had been improperly filled out by voters in a tight congressional race. In a 4-2 decision, the court struck down Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's directive that said the votes should be counted. Voters had improperly filled out the outer envelope on the disputed ballots, which had been among about 27,000 left to be counted in the undecided 15th district congressional race between Republican Steve Stivers and Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy. The decision allows Franklin County voting officials to count the other remaining...

The search party looking for 133 missing ballots in the Minneapolis elections warehouse found some ballots all right, but not the ones they wanted. This morning, an envelope of 12 unsealed but apparently uncounted absentee ballots were found in a box filled with stacks of plastic-wrapped unused ballots. Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert speculated they were put there by a confused elections judge on Election Day and undiscovered until now, the final day of the historic U.S. Senate recount. The ballots will be submitted to the state Canvassing Board, said city spokesman Matt Laible. Still eluding the searchers was their...

On Dec. 8, 2000, supporters of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush burst into cheers in the rotunda of the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee, Fla. They had just learned of a judge's ruling that absentee ballots cast in pro-Bush counties would not be thrown out. They taunted supporters of Democrat Al Gore with the song that baseball fans sing when an opposing pitcher is knocked out of the game. "Na-na-na-nah, hey hey, good-bye!" they chanted. Bush was pronounced the winner of the state of Florida, and the presidency, four days later, and the preservation of those "absentees" was a...

Things may not be going as well as Al Franken hoped in the recount, but don't tell that to Nate Silver. The numbers junkie behind FiveThirtyEight.com predicts that Franken will win the recount — once all challenges are resolved — by 27 votes. (Related: Franken losing ground to Coleman on DFL turf How'd he come up with that number? It's little complex — OK, that's an understatement — but Silver basically did a regression analysis using recounted precincts where there were few or no challenged ballots (Franken has done well there) and projected it across the rest of the state....

A correspondent writes: Just returned [from Crystal]. We counted the last three precincts without incident. Then the City Clerk made the announcement that she had found some absentee ballots that had not been processed yet from another previously closed precinct, Ward 4 Precinct 2. Apparently Friday afternoon she was given the order by SOS [the Secretary of State] to release the names of voters who had their ballots rejected. While canvassing the absentee ballots she found 8 ballots bound together that had not been processed on election night. She claimed they were valid ballots that had been filled out by...