Blake Hulnick and Daniel O’Brien, interns, AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project
November 7, 2007

News stories seem to proliferate after every election about the alarmingly low turnout rates among American voters. A story that frequently goes unreported, however, concerns the sizable chunk of our population living abroad. In the 2006 general election, some 41% of all eligible voters participated, but among voters covered by Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), that figure was just 5.5%. The explanation is almost certainly not that only one in twenty Americans living abroad saw fit to vote. Instead, this low turnout is attributable to shortcomings in the UOCAVA, the 1986 federal law that governs voting rights for overseas citizens, including military voters. The law has improved the ability of overseas citizens to cast absentee ballots, but it is now outdated and requires modification to secure enfranchisement for the people it is designed to protect.

Overseas voters covered under UOCAVA — military and Merchant Marine members, State Department employees, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) workers, and citizens permanently living abroad —participate in elections at rates far below the national average. Although the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates there are as many as six million UOCAVA-eligible voters, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) reported that only 17% of these voters requested ballots for the 2006 election. This figure is far below the national estimate of 41% of eligible voters who successfully voted in 2006. It gets worse. Of the “requested ballots,” only one-third were ultimately counted, which means that only 5.5% of UOCAVA voters successfully cast a ballot.

Unfortunately, the UOCAVA statistics reported to the EAC are misleading. The vast majority of the uncounted ballots were returned to local jurisdictions as undeliverable, and most frustratingly, local election officials knew it would happen ahead of time. UOCAVA requires ballots be mailed to registered overseas voters for two full federal election cycles after they register for the program. Given the constant mobility of this population, which includes active military members who are frequently redeployed, the requirement is unnecessary and wasteful. Beyond mandating the dissemination of ballots to outdated addresses, this provision hampers the ability of local administrators to evaluate participation accurately. Fortunately, there are remedies.

The decentralized nature of federal elections severely convolutes the process of developing national guidelines for overseas voters. States have widely divergent deadlines and rules for registration, ballot requests, and ballot submissions. One fix is to make a centralized source of state-by-state information available to voters. The Overseas Vote Foundation, which offers free cutting-edge Internet-based services to voters, is a major help in this regard. Citizens covered by UOCAVA can easily navigate a recently revamped website to get the specific registration rules for their state and locality, simplifying the process immensely.

Short of revamping the entire system, a more efficient use of existing technology would go a long way. Voters must be provided with electronic methods of registering and requesting ballots. UOCAVA voters experience far greater delays than domestic voters when trying to correspond with local election officials by mail. Foreign postal systems and the Military Postal Service Agency can be extremely slow in delivering mail to Americans abroad. Registration is currently possible via fax in many states and via e-mail in a few others. Too many states, however, offer no electronic means of remote registration. In a positive development, all but three states (PDF)—Alabama, New York, and Wyoming—do allow some electronic submission of ballot requests. As researchers suggest in a recently-commissioned draft report to the EAC, ballots should be created in Portable Document Format (PDF) for easy distribution to distant voters. This would ensure both instant distribution and accurate reproduction of the ballot. The concerns of local officials about distributing too many ballots should be weighed more carefully against the ability of overseas voters to cast their ballots on time. There is very little to lose and a lot to gain from increased flexibility in methods of ballot distribution.

Disseminating ballots via e-mail, in particular, offers a number of benefits over fax and mail. Beyond maintaining the integrity of the original ballot image far better than a faxed ballot, an e-mailed ballot could be filled out on-screen and printed, a practice that could help reduce the frequency of ballots spoiled by mistakes. It would also not require a follow-up phone call to confirm receipt as a faxed ballot should, according to the recommendations in the same draft report to the EAC. Instead, the voter could do so by return receipt or responding to the e-mail at his convenience, just as he could retrieve the ballot without waiting around what may, in the case of many military voters, be a crowded public fax machine. Compared to fax, e-mail is also more secure, given that most UOCAVA voters are active duty military members using individual Department of Defense e-mail addresses—itself a cursory form of identity verification.

The Mail-In Ballot Tracking Act of 2007 (PDF), currently under consideration in the House of Representatives, would institute a number of tracking requirements for domestic mail-in ballots but would exempt overseas votes covered by UOCAVA. Congress should consider similar ballot tracking requirements that do apply to UOCAVA voters, which would be helpful in addressing the final, paper-based phase of completed ballot submission. While we have little control over foreign postal services, some tracking would be possible to the extent that the U.S. Postal Service and the Military Postal Service Agency are involved in handling these ballots.

Existing technology has yet to confirm a workable method for electronically casting a ballot from a remote location. However, by removing old barriers and streamlining the processes of registering to vote, requesting a ballot, and disseminating it to the voter, officials can markedly improve the overseas voting system using tools they already have available.

Blake Hulnick and Daniel O’Brien can be reached at polcorner1@aei.org.

Viewpoint is an occasional feature analyzing various election reform issues.