Number of overseas voters may break records in ’08

Organizations dedicated to helping overseas voters cast their ballot this year are reporting unprecedented rates of participation over the past few months as Election Day and absentee ballot deadlines near.

The Defense Department’s Federal Voting Assistance Program, which assists all U.S. voters overseas, reported about 10.5 million visits to www.fvap.gov this year as of Oct. 19, up from 7.3 million visits for all of 2004.

The site provides absentee voter information by state, and about 15,000 user accounts have been set up in which voters can fill out and generate state-specific absentee ballot request forms, according to Army Lt. Col. Les’ Melnyk, a FVAP spokesman.

The Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonprofit voter advocacy group, averaged about 32,000 visits a day in September to www.overseasvotefoundation.org and other OVF-supported sites, such as obama.overseasvotefoundation.organd mccain.overseasvotefoundation.org.

This is the first election in which presidential candidates have offered such services to overseas voters, according to Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, head of OVF.

"Nothing like this was on the Kerry or Bush campaigns," she said. "It didn’t exist yet."

Numerous states have also signed on with OVF to use the group’s Web site programs, which offer everything from absentee ballot information by state to a tool that helps voters fill out and request absentee ballots based on their state’s unique requirements.

The OVF sites saw more than 3.5 million visitors this year and nearly half a million visits alone in the first week of October, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said.

"All measures point toward more votes coming in from the military and overseas than ever," she said. "We are very curious to see how this affects actual turnout and whether election officials are able to cope with this massive increase."

About 145,000 absentee ballots were mailed to overseas military voters between Sept. 8 and Oct. 14, according to the Military Postal Service Agency. While some states now offer fax and e-mail transmission of ballots, snail mail is still the most common delivery option.

While MPSA representative Shari Lawrence said the agency didn’t have ballot transmission numbers for the 2004 election cycle, about 119,000 overseas military ballots were mailed out from election offices in 2006. Of those, only about half were counted, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.

Of the 145,000 ballots MPSA handled from the States, about 104,000 voted ballots were mailed back to the States as of Oct. 14.

About 13,000 of the ballots coming from the States were returned because they were undeliverable as addressed, according to the MPSA.

Despite what appears to be an increase in military voter participation this year, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said the primary problem continues to be troops not getting their ballots in time to vote.

The OVF site offers an electronic version of the federal write-in absentee ballot, an emergency ballot for federal elections available if a registered overseas voter didn’t receive their state’s absentee ballot in time.

While improvements are being made at various levels to help overseas military voters, challenges remain, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said.

"I still have reports from military guys who haven’t gotten their ballots in eight years," she said.