Military personnel do not register to vote, cast their absentee ballots, or execute their Constitutional right to vote at anywhere near the rate as their civilian counterparts.  The voting process they are forced to navigate is overly complex, error prone, and subject to substantial mail delays.  Because of these inherent problems, only 22% of the military voted in 2006, as compared to 40% of the general population.  Similarly, many military voters never receive their absentee ballots, have difficulty navigating the process in time to complete and return the ballot by the varied State-set voting deadlines, and therefore have far lower absentee ballot cast rates than the general population: only 26% of military personnel cast their absentee ballot in 2006 compared to 85% of the general population.  This represents 484,000 military personnel who requested absentee ballots in 2006 but did not cast them. 

 

By far the most significant hindrance to military voters successfully casting ballots is time it takes for absentee ballots to be delivered to military voters and returned to local election officials.  23% of military and overseas ballots rejected in 2006 were rejected because they arrived too late.  39% of military and overseas voters stated they did not receive their absentee ballots until the last two weeks of October 2008.  A recent report by the Pew Center on the States indicated that slow mail delivery was the single most significant part of the military absentee voting timeline, accounting for 75.6% of that entire process timeline for the State of New York, and 70.5% in Utah.
 

The absentee balloting system was developed to deliver ballots around the corner to local voters, not around the world to military personnel deployed to remote, inhospitable, and combat zones.  To expect the laws of physics regarding the time and distance realities of postal mail delivery to somehow make way for the desire to have mail delivered faster to military personnel is simply ignoring reality.  Almost every reform considered to assist military voters and their families is a work-around for this one simple reality: most States send their ballots out too late, and by too slow a method, for most military voters to have a reasonable chance to receive them, vote them, and return them in time.  Until those postal mail delivery times are extended, or quicker means of both delivering and returning ballots is implemented, little improvement is likely.