With only 19 days to go until election day, it's been discovered that the election boards in a number of Blue State jurisdictions have failed to send out military ballots to our warriors overseas in time for the ballots to be returned in time to be counted.
Among the worst offenders are Illinois and New York. As a matter of fact, New York had already received a waiver, which the Obama Department of Justice supported, allowing New York to mail ballots on October 1. They couldn’t even meet that farcical deadline.
According to the Federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (the MOVE Act),ballots were supposed to be mailed out a minimum of 45 days before the elections.It simply didn't happen, with the result that a lot of the people who are putting their lives on the line for our country aren't going to have a say in who runs it.
This has occurred so often by now that it appears to be a regular tactic of Democrats. Remember Al Gore's attorneys celebrating in 2000 over disqualifying almost 5,000 Florida military votes after Gore's campaign prepared and sent out a memo to its agents on how to find technicalities to get military ballots trashed?
The rationale for this is simple, really. The military tends to vote Republican, so every military ballot the Democrats can stop from being counted is a vote the GOP isn't going to get. In Illinois, where the Senate and a number of congressional races are razor close, it could be all the edge they need. And it's the same story in a number of other Blue State races nationwide.
If the military tended to vote Democrat, you'd see the Obama Administration moving heaven and earth to get those ballots counted, that I guarantee you.
As it is, the Obama Justice Department is reportedly investigating this, which means that nothing concrete will be done about this until well after the election, if then.
In fact, nothing beyond a desultory investigation is likely to be done in any case. Here's why.
The DOJ lawyer who was in charge of seeing to it that states complied with the MOVE Act was Rebecca Wertz, who was there as a temporary appointment to the position of Deputy Chief of the voting rights section.
Way back in July, two former DOJ attorneys, Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams went public with accusations that the DOJ was ignoring the MOVE Act and encouraging states to use waivers to bypass the new law.
"It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted," said Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights. "The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws."
Senator John Cornyn went even further, writing a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing concern that the DOJ was encouraging states to opt out of the requirements of the new law.
In his letter to Holder, Cornyn cited minutes from the 2010 winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), during which Rebecca Wertz informed state election officials that the legislative language regarding waivers was 'unclear'. She described the provisions of the law as “fairly general” and “somewhat of an open question as to what type of information” a state needs to submit in order to for their waiver application to be granted.
In other words, what Wertz told the various state officials is, nudge nudge, wink wink, 'there is this law but it's not real clear and if any of you want waivers so you don't have to comply, pretty much any waiver requests you send us with any kind of excuses are going to be honored.'
Cornyn wrote, “If these are the positions of the DOJ, then they fly in the face of the clear statutory language, undermine the provisions in question, and jeopardize the voting rights of our men and women in uniform."
“If a state is not in compliance with the statute, there is little room for “dialogue” or negotiation, and the Voting Section should take immediate steps to enforce the law and safeguard military and overseas voting rights, including pursuing litigation whenever necessary,” Cornyn wrote. “The comments by the DOJ official, as reported in the NASS minutes, appear to ignore Congress’ clear legislative language and could facilitate the disenfranchisement of our men and women in uniform.”
That was back in July, and two and a half months later absolutely nothing concrete has been done by the DOJ to ensure the vote to our overseas military.So now they're announcing surprise over the whole matter and launching 'an investigation' when it's too late to do anything about it:
Oh, and Rebecca Wertz? Her reward for her part in disenfranchising military voters was a promotion by her boss Thomas Perez that made her temporary position as Deputy Chief of the DOJ's voting rights section permanent.
If any of you have loved ones or people that are close to you serving in our military overseas, remember in November which party it is that's doing everything it can to see to it that their votes don't count.
UPDATE, 10/26: Like I said, nothing beyond a desultory investigation by th eObama Department of Justice is likely to be done. Today, the Department of Justice made an agreement with the State of Illinois that essentially agreed to give Illinois a pass for violating federal election laws. Basically, what the DOJ did was to give voters from six Illinois counties a few extra days to send back their ballots while totally ignoring the violations of the MOVE Act by the other 29 counties.
Come November 2nd, those of you have who loved ones or people that are close to you serving in our military overseas or simply have a sense of how wrong this is need to remember which party it is that's doing everything it can to see to disenfranchise the men and women who protect our freedom.
Vote accordingly.
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