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| -Election 2012 |
| Suppressing the Military vote |
| 2012-09-07 |
| Estimates say that the number of troops who will end up voting in the November could be down by more than a third. "We could see an election where turnout is down 25 or 35 percent," predicts Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, which brands this yearÂ’s predicted military voter participation levels as "bleak." In the crucial swing state of Ohio, the groupÂ’s report found that only 3.3 percent of the eligible military voters have requested ballots as of Aug. 21. North Carolina had even less, just 1.7 percent, Virginia a scant 1.4 percent. And the key state of Florida reported a rate of 15.7 percent. "What could happen is that we once again could face an election, as we have had in past years, that our men and women in uniform aren't able to have their voices heard on election day, and itÂ’s too bad," Eversole laments. He calls for a greater effort to get the military vote out. "Our service members have so much on the line. They are not only overseas fighting for our rights but in some ways fighting for their own rights," he said. Eversole says in the 2010 election there were "widespread failures" in getting absentee ballots into the hands of deployed troops, citing 14 states that had at least one county that did not distribute the ballots on time. |
| Posted by:Procopius2k |