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CHICAGO (WLS) - A Chicago federal judge is rejecting the Illinois Republican Party effort to give overseas military members more time to mail back their absentee ballots. Several Illinois counties failed to mail absentee ballots to overseas military members from Illinois by a state mandated Sept. 18 deadline. The U.S. Justice Department went to court and last Friday announced it had reached an agreement with Illinois officials to rectify the situation. The agreement only affects six downstate counties and it means their overseas voters get an extra two to three days to return their ballots and still have them counted.

WASHINGTON - One out of every four ballots requested by military personnel and other Americans living overseas for the 2008 election may have gone uncounted, according to findings released at a Senate hearing. Sen. Charles Schumer, chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said the study released Wednesday, while providing only a snapshot of voting patterns, "is enough to show that the balloting process for service members is clearly in need of an overhaul." The committee, working with the Congressional Research Service, surveyed election offices in seven states with high numbers of military personnel: California, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,...

Of the millions who will head to the polls this November, who among them takes greater risks to protect our Constitutional voting rights than the military men and women serving the world over, often in harm’s way, to guarantee our freedom? The 2004 Presidential election is the first in over three decades to take place while America is at war. As November 2 approaches, we owe it to our brave men and women serving overseas to do everything we can to ensure that they, too, can cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice. Although our laws guarantee every...

Amid new evidence that civilians lagged far behind soldiers in voting from abroad four years ago, political operatives on both sides of the presidential campaign raced this week to help Americans overseas cast their ballots in time for next month's election. Sixty percent of the overseas military voted in the 2000 election, up from 53 percent in 1996, according to a new Pentagon report obtained yesterday by The New York Times. At the same time, voting by civilians dropped to 22 percent from 29 percent, the report said. Civilians' low participation rate is raising fears among Democrats who believe that...

Four years after overseas voting became a battleground in the presidential election in Florida, millions of civilians and soldiers living abroad still face a bewildering and unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted. Election officials concede that tens of thousands of Americans overseas might not get their ballots in time to cast their votes. Late primaries and legal wrangling caused local election offices in several battleground states to fail to mail out their absentee ballots by Sept. 20, a cutoff date that officials say is necessary to ensure that everyone can return them on...

The U.S. Defense Department said Tuesday that it's trying to find a way to permit American expatriates to connect to an absentee voting site that has been cordoned off because of the risk of hackers. Internet users in large portions of the world have been blocked from connecting to the voting assistance Web site, which tells absentee voters how to cast ballots in the November election. The list of Internet providers that appear to be blocked includes British Telecom, Wanadoo, Telefonica and China Telecom. "We're aware of the problem, and we're working on a solution," Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen...

From Electoral-Vote.com: I have it on good authority that overseas voters are registering in huge numbers this time, maybe double or triple 2000. I was told that the number of people who showed up at the Democratic party caucus in England earlier this year was 10 times what it was in 2000, ditto in other countries. Americans overseas vote in the state they last lived in, even if that was decades ago. There are about 7 million overseas Americans and probably about 5 million are over 18. In Florida, it was the overseas absentee ballots that swung the election. I...