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Etopia Media Voting News #1:

The Pentagon unveils its plan to improve the overseas voting process for its troops

The Pentagon, Virginia
June 3, 2004

By Marc Strassman
Reporter
Etopia Media Voting News
Etopia Media Political News Networks
Etopia Media News Networks

Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Charles Abell listens to a reporter's question during the press briefing referred to below

Yesterday

On January 1, 2004, the Latest Voting News, under the headline "It's Not Too Late to Stop SERVE," published a page entitled "Conscientious Use of Paper Ballots, Not SERVE, Is the Way to Go for Military and Other Overseas Voters." It said, in part:

"The need for all this could be avoided if sufficient attention were paid to registering military voters, making sure that the proper paper ballots were given to them before they shipped out or sent to them once they have been, providing them with the time and space to vote, and seeing to it that their completed ballots are collected and speedily delivered to their home precincts and counties in a timely and expeditious way."

In commentaries published on January 18th and 19th, the Latest Voting News called directly on the Department of Defense to stop SERVE, its proposed remote Internet voting program for troops and other overseas voters

On February 5th, the Pentagon announced that it was stopping SERVE.

Yesterday, June 2, 2004, the Pentagon held a press conference featuring Charles Abell, Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness; and Paul Vogel, Vice President for Network Operations Management of the U.S. Postal Service. They announced that the Defense Department was going to do what had been suggested in the Latest Voting News five months earlier.

You can read about their plans to modernize and upgrade the system by which absentee paper ballots are delivered to military voters overseas by clicking here.

Early in the press conference, an unidentified reporter asked Mr. Abell, the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, "And also, what happened to -- why Internet balloting was not moved forward with, please."

After a lot of verbiage and no answer, the same reporter asked Mr. Abell, "You never answered my question about the electronic -- Internet voting."

Mr. Abell answered by blaming the non-presence of the unnamed SERVE project on the report of some members of the Security Peer Review Group that it wasn't secure and the desire of the Pentagon not to call into question the legitimacy of military votes by using such a risky system.

He went on to say, "So we have since that decision been working on this, continued to work on this Internet system. We are putting it in a file, if you will, and we will wait to see what our congressional direction is. As you're probably aware, the House bill and the Senate bill give us different approaches to the future on that, and so we'll wait to see what their guidance is as to how we continue."

A visit to Thomas, the Congressional legislation database, didn't immediately locate either a House bill or a Senate bill that gave any approaches at all to the Pentagon's future work on Internet voting.

Maybe Mr. Abell or one of his assistants will be able to help locate that information tomorrow.

In the meantime, given that the Pentagon has just announced a new round of "stop-loss" that will effectively keep many military "volunteers" in the service beyond the time they had contracted for, it's possible that more soldiers than expected will want to avail themselves of the opportunity to practice some of the democracy they've been told they're fighting for and cast their ballots for candidates or ballot measures they feel will serve their interests.