Military voters ready for ballots

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Military voters ready for ballots
By Tom Philpott, Special to Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, February 23, 2008


Military people seem to be at least as excited as other Americans about voting this election year, according to a few yardsticks.

Military voting assistance officers are ordering a lot of material to meet information demands in their units, said Polli Brunelli, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which informs active-duty members, their families and Americans overseas how to vote using absentee ballots.

More telling, perhaps, is a spike in traffic on FVAP’s 12-year-old Web site where a potential pool of more than 6 million absentee voters can get election information, voter registration forms and ballot applications.

In 2004, the last presidential election year, the Web site was accessed 263,900 times in January. This January visits jumped to 1,284,000.

“There {has been} a tremendous amount of interest in the primaries,” said Brunelli, sparked by “new candidates” and intense news coverage.

Also, because many more states moved primaries into January and February, FVAP urged military and overseas voters to register and to request absentee ballots months earlier than in 2004. That outreach effort included an “e-mail blast” to 1.3 million active duty personnel encouraging early review of state requirements and deadlines for primary voting, Brunelli said.

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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=52711