U.S. Postal Services Helps Soldiers Vote

By John Runyan – Army News Service

Soldiers Vote Fast with New Postal System Initiative

A new labeling system at the U.S. Postal Service is designed to expedite absentee ballots to Soldiers deployed around the world.

USPS employees will contact 3,000 county election officials all over the country to coordinate mailing of overseas absentee ballots. Once the blank local ballots are printed, they will be sent by local post offices via overnight Express Mail to San Francisco, Miami and New York, the three military gateways.

USPS will mail successive groups of ballots to military gateways daily and will determine the number of ballots per location at the gateways. Then the ballots will be sorted by destination and placed in containers specially marked for visibility and priority………………………….

DoD’s Military Postal System will then give the ballots priority handling for delivery overseas, will ensure they receive a proper, legible postmark upon return, and will place them in easily identifiable containers. The ballots will then receive priority processing for delivery back to county election officials.

“If anything is moving, (the ballots) will be moving as well,” said Mark DeDomenic, assistant deputy director at the Military Postal Service Agency.

The Army is asking that all Soldiers be registered to vote absentee by Aug. 15, said Jim Davis, the Army’s voting action officer. That way they should receive their ballots sometime in September and can have them sent out by the Oct. 11 deadline.

Davis said both of these deadlines are designed for Soldiers in the theater of operations and he encouraged all Soldiers to register and vote, even if they miss the deadlines. Most states will accept absentee ballots until the close of business on election day, Nov. 2, but the Oct. 11 deadline should ensure all ballots will arrive in time to be counted.

Each state has specified deadlines for receipt of absentee ballots. For example, absentee ballots for Louisiana must be in no later than the day of the election while New York requires that the ballots are postmarked by the day before the election. North Carolina ballots must be in by 5 p.m. the day before the election and Pennsylvania absentee ballots must arrive by 5 p.m. on the Friday before the election.

If those Soldiers, family or DA civilians are located outside the United States send in their request for an absentee ballot in sufficient time and didn’t receive their ballot, they can use the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot. This form allows them to write in their votes and send it in by the deadline.

“Voting assistance officers at each overseas unit are required to have stock of the FWAB for this situation,” Davis said.

Davis also said that if a Soldier filled out and sent in the FWAB and then received a ballot, the local ballot could still be filled out and sent back in if it arrived in time.

Currently, Davis said the Army is trying to get the message to get registered, to as many Soldiers as possible.

An AKO-all e-mail was sent at the beginning of May to 1.3 million recipients, reminding them of the importance to register and the details of how to do so. Davis said the e-mail was the largest ever sent out on AKO.

Senior Army leadership has directed an Army-wide Personnel Asset Inventory be conducted during the period July 30 through Aug. 15. This will be yet another opportunity to provide the Federal Post Card Application to Soldiers and to provide the necessary support and assistance, Davis said.

“We’ve got an emphasis (on this issue) from the secretary of Defense all the way down,” Davis said. “We want to make sure all the Soldiers are provided with the opportunity to register and cast their ballot.