U.S. absentee voting registration red tape ends on the Internet

A new Internet service introduced last week in Washington, D.C. is expected to ease and streamline absentee voting in U.S. elections for eligible voters living abroad.

The site, www.overseas votefoundation.org, may prove beneficial to the estimated 120,000 eligible U.S. voters in Israel as they prepare for what is expected to be a particularly interesting election year in 2008.

The introduction of the service follows a recent and troubling report, which found that just one third of the nearly one million absentee ballots requested for last year's general election by overseas Americans were cast or counted.

The report, issued last month by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, was seen as a blow to many expatriates and voter advocacy organizations, which have long encouraged voting among overseas Americans and assured citizens that the ballots they cast from abroad make a difference.

"Unfortunately, when military personnel and other citizens overseas try to vote, there is a good chance that their votes won't get counted," said Michael Caudell- Feagan, project director of Make Voting Work, which helped launched the Web site together with the Overseas Vote Foundation, a non-partisan voting advocacy organization. Make Voting Work is an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Americans living abroad deserve a system that allows each voter to confidently register and submit his/her ballot," Caudell-Feagan said.

Each state sets its own requirements for overseas voters, and the result can be a difficult-to-navigate bureaucratic maze. The new site, however, is remarkably user-friendly. It prompts the voter for information needed to register to vote in his or her home state and will flag any failure to type in required information. After the on-line form is completed, the site creates a printable form and provides the appropriate mailing address in the U.S.

The program, which takes under five minutes to complete, eliminates the need to individually research and navigate specific state regulations and mailing instructions. And it is completely non-partisan, unlike similar initiatives in the past.

According to the report, 992,034 absentee ballots were requested in 2006 by overseas civilians or members of the military, just a fraction of the estimated six million U.S. citizens who are eligible to cast their vote from abroad.

The new service is part of a multi-million dollar project that aims to modernize elections by advancing policies, practices and technologies that make voting possible for eligible voters without compromising accuracy.