The Department of Defense and an e-mail encryption company called PostX are about to announce that PostX has been chosen to fix what has long been a thorny problem for the military: ensuring that absentee ballots of soldiers serving overseas get collected and counted. This is welcome news by any measure, as it’s impossible to argue with the notion that men and women serving this country abroad deserve to have their votes delivered and counted back home.
However, the development does raise questions, primary among them: What about the rest of us? Absentee voting in general is notoriously difficult and unreliable. Not a day goes by without news of yet another vulnerability in our electronic voting systems or injustice in voting laws and regulations. And, because the execution of absentee voting by military personnel has been a hot potato in recent years – particularly in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election – there are going to be questions asked about the fairness of treating one class of voter better than others, in particular when the political leanings of that class are clearly understood.
As for the upcoming Defense Department/PostX announcement, here’s more from a company spokeswoman’s e-mail:
“Many soldiers overseas jump through hoops to send in votes each election, but are they even counted? While our Armed Forces are defending America, shouldn’t their votes count the most? [PostX has been chosen] to enable secure absentee ballot retrieval by the U.S. Armed Forces via Web, e-mail from a desktop computer or a mobile device regardless of where [military personnel] are stationed. . . . The PostX solution will allow soldiers to check registration status, request ballots and print ballots, making the process of absentee ballots much faster and more efficient than in the past.”
In addition, you can read a Defense Department memo that goes into great detail regarding the challenges faced by military personnel trying to vote from their posts, and the pluses and minuses of various solutions, including those from PostX.
I’ve met periodically with PostX executives for all of the 10 years the company has been around and have always been impressed with its products. There’s little doubt in my mind that PostX will get the job done. And while I am no fan of Internet voting, or electronic voting in general, there certainly can be justification for extraordinary measures – properly secured – when the voting rights of Americans are at stake.
According to the company spokeswoman: “PostX [has] tapped Fortify Software to analyze the integrity of the PostX code base as it was built to meet the needs of the [Department of Defense] and our armed forces.”
All well and good. I will, however, take exception to one point made by the PostX spokeswoman: No, the votes of military personnel – wherever stationed – should not count the most. Our military personnel are not tasked with defending their right to vote but the rights of all.
A soldier’s right to vote should be considered no more important than that of his sister serving in the Peace Corps or of his brother studying abroad. It should be considered no more important than his parents’ right to vote back home without first enduring an eight-hour wait in line or the uncertainty of not knowing whether their ballots were counted by an electronic voting machine that produces no auditable paper trail.
So good for the military brass for keeping on this problem and here’s hoping that with the help of modern technology they’ve got it licked.
And now it’s up to the rest of us to keep the heat on our political leaders to make sure that everyone gets to vote stateside, too . . . and that every vote gets counted.
