we also know that if a republic like ours, being a citizen does not require that we exercise that right to vote. only occasionally do a majority of those who have that fundamental right to vote actually exercise that right. only 37.8% of the voting age population of our country voted in the election of 2010 which was a nonpresidential year. we compare numbers between nonpresidential years and presidential years. for instance, in the last presidential election, 56.8% of those voted age population participated.

interesting to note that the highest participation in the last five or so decades was in 1960 with some 60% and the highest nonpresidential year was in 1966 with 40.8% of the voting age population voting. when we think of motivating the men and women in uniform, the motivation extends not only to those in uniform, but to all americans as we. what motivates any individual to exercise this fundamental right to vote is dependent on those on those who would provide the motivation, which surrounds the campaigns and the politics today. but what brings us here today primarily is how best to facilitate those men and women in uniform and their families that opportunity to exercise that fundamental right to vote. for without the opportunity to exercise that right to vote, we are denying that right. whether they choose to exercise it or not. to deny that right to our men and women in uniform who protect

that right does dishonor to them and does dishonor the our country. so that's sort of the premise behind why congress enacted the move act and all those other initials that we talk about in this particular group. and why we are here today is to talk about how we are doing and giving our men and women in uniform that opportunity. i'm joined today by five outstanding individuals. let me just briefly read their bio. i have cut them down a tad bit. jocelyn benson, would you raise your hand, so we know who we are is an associate professor at wayne state university, founder of the military spouses of michigan, founder of the michigan center for election law which hosts projects which support transparency and

integrity in elections. in 2011, she was selected to serve with retired u.s. supreme court justice sandra day o'connor on the national board of directors. and a nonprofit created by justice o'connor to improve civics education throughout the country. she's a former member of the abas committee on election law, developed two protection efforts in michigan, published the book on the role of secretary of state in enforcing election and campaign laws and in 2010 was the michigan democratic party's candidate for secretary of state. she previously served as a law clerk to the honorable damon keith on the u.s. court of appeals and the sixth district. she earned her master's at oxford and her law degree at harvard. nice to have you here. obviously very smart.

bob carey was appointed director of the federal voting assistance program in july of 2009. where's the rest of your bio? prior to that, he served as executive director of the national defense committee as a member of the board of directors of the overseas vote foundation. after graduating from the university of pennsylvania, he was commissioned in the navy, served on destroyers, carriers and was an a 6 e bombardier navigator through two deployments including 37 combat missions during desert storm. left active duty in '95 to serve on the staff of two united states senators, served as senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy and since 9/11 have been recalled to

active duty four times. and bob, i want to thank you on behalf of all the americans for your service. to our country. thank you very much. >> my honor. >> tom tarantino. he's the senior legislative associate for iraq and afghanistan veterans of america. he manages the legislative team and is responsible for executing their goals working with governments, congress, other decision making bodies and veterans organizations. tom is a former army captain who left service the in 2007 after ten years in the service. he spent a year in deployment with the 11th armored regiment in iraq where he earned both combat action badge and the bronze star. thank you for your service as well. >> thanks. >> hans von spakovsky -- did i do that right? >> that was close, but not quite. >> i actually practiced that a couple of times last night. but you'll correct me when your time comes. >> i have a tendency to do that.

>> hans has a wide range of expertise in civil justice, immigration, election and related issues including campaign finance reform. voter fraud. enforcement of federal voting rights laws. election administrating. the standards and on and on. he served on the virginia committee of the u.s. commission on civil rights. he's been published in countless national newspapers, he's been on countless radio and television shows. he's testified before state legislatures and congressional committees and made a multitude of presentations on this issue across the country. so for those of us who have been in this business a while, we all know of hans. candace wheeler. how are you? >> i'm fine, thank you. >> good. candace is -- joined the national military family association government relations staff as the deputy director in june of 2007. prior to that, she served the organization in various capacities including chairman and ceo during which time she served as the association's spokesman before congress, the department of defense and the military and civilian community. as her government relations director, she addresses issues relevant to quality of life for families of the uniformed services, including responsibility for absentee

voting rights and a whole host of other responsibilities. she represents this association as a member of the alliance for military and overseas voting rights. and serves on the advisory panel for the military heroes initiative. she's also the cochair of the personnel committee for military coalition which is compromised of 34 military veteran and uniformed service organizations representing 5.5 million members. she was an air force spouse for 22 years. and knows firsthand the effect overseas deployments and transitions have on military families. and we want to thank you for your service as well. >> thank you very much. >> you're welcome. now, a couple things.

this is a discussion amongst friends and we do share a common interest. there may be some disagreements but we will keep those disagreements civil. i'd also remind you that we are on c-span and i have been to enough of these to know that sometimes we revert to the aknack row anymore language, so we may not want to use the acronyms so freely as if we were talking over coffee. being a creature of the senate, i no ewhat a filibuster looks like, so we will try to avoid having a filibuster on any of these issues. it will be an even, fair exchange. let me begin the discussion by first asking candace wheeler and

tom tarantino who i think represents more directly the interests of the active military duty, how are we doing in giving our armed forces personnel the opportunity to participate in the voting process? candace, let's start with you. >> well, i would say we are doing better than we have done in the past. we have seen a 20% -- 27% rise in actually having more participation on the part of our military community, but we have also seen the fact that we still have very high numbers. i think it's around 29% are not receiving their ballots in time to be able to get them back in order to vote. so there's still a problem with being disenfranchised, making sure we're cutting down on that time that states are sending them out on time, and that our families still can vote. one of the things i would point out that as military families when we're talking about absentee voting, their not always voting from overseas. our families vote absentee from the states as well. many of them are living in shared households where the service member may vote in one

state and the spouse may vote in another. so this issue is more complex than being in a duty station overseas. >> tom? >> yeah, i mean, it's certainly getting better. i remember in 2004 i was a voting assistant officer and platoon leader and it was a ridiculous process. i mean, because i was, you know, i personally, you know, i'm more political so i wanted to make sure my soldiers had and the united nations to participate in the elections. it was -- i literally had a binder that was about nine inches thick and it took roughly an hour just to get one person registered to vote because you had to go through, you know, you had the general thing and then you had to look up the state level stuff and then figure out can they fax it, can they send it? it took a lot of time, frankly time that i didn't have. because i was getting ready to go to war. and so i think candace really brought unan important point is that, you know, overseas voting, there are clear issues with. the military replicates those issues and it's not just the fact that you're living detached from what we call in the military your home of record.

it's also -- you know, there are a lot of cultural concerns, a much younger population that has lower voter turnout. in the military while you're serving you're generally not that political. you havette beer things to do. in election night of 2004, i was watching this village getting ready to go to iraq. i was busy. so, you know, i think one of the things that we haven't quite figured out yet is low voter turnout because of the structural problems to access? not saying we shouldn't fix those. i think we have gotten much better especially in the last four or five years in fixing those or is it because of culture reasons, because of apathy? this is a question we haven't figured out yet. one of the things about this issue, it's not something you can track easily over two or three years.

why? because elections are -- you know, every two years, but let's be honest, the ones that really count in numbers are every four years that's the ones that everyone is really paying attention. >> we'd like them to pay attention to all of them. >> we would like them to. but we pass the move act in 2009. we have only had one trial run. it will take a couple of times before we actually figure out where the holes are. and where we -- unlike a lot of the policy work that like candace and i specifically do, you know, we can implement a program in about a year we can figure out where the holes are. it will take us a lot longer for this one. i think it's something -- we not only have to keep in mind, but it will make the problem more difficult to solve because technology and, you know,

methods increase at a much faster rate than we can gather data. >> thank you, tom. bob, obviously what we have heard from candace and tom is that there's improvements that have been made and that there are more improvements that need to be made, but we are making progress. you're sort of the guy in charge of that, the front end of that spear. as you know, i have read through your material and all of the material provided on that, and there's a 29% participation rate. are we making progress, enough progress, is there fundamental impediments to making more progress? i know you have the numbers. >> i believe that we're making progress. is it sufficient? and to some extent this becomes an overall policy issue of what you want our voting process to be. if you want it to be a get out the vote, that's not what it is

and by law. by law the federal law says to provide equal opportunity as you said earlier. you know, right now for -- what we have tried to do is say, okay, the military voter participation rate is lower than the general population, but is that indicative of the younger nature of the population or is that indicative of the structural issues? i believe it's both. >> part of what tom was talking about. >> right. so what we have done is we have broken it down by age cohorts, between, you know, 18 to 24-year-olds, 25 to 29. and tried to figure out how those compare. and so what we found is that for all the age cohorts except the 18 to 24-year-olds, the military voter participation rate is higher. amongst the 18 to 24 it's still lower. but that's important, because 60% of the military is under 29 years of age. only 6% of the military is over 45 years of age. >> i don't know if you can use that term on tv. >> i guess i already did. but, you know, 53% of the general population is over 45

years of age and voter participation rate goes up exponentially over time. the other element is actually the nature of the military population and physics plays a part. a bag of mail containing ballots weighs and takes up space. that last mile going out to the combat outpost, getting to the ship at sea, that weight matters. it's replacing bullets, bandages, replacement troops. and so the military commander has to make a choice. which goes? well, that's what we're trying to focus as much as possible on the electronic delivery of these ballots. in order to be able to take that out of the equation. and also to take out of the equation the time line. you know, when it takes 20 to 30 days for a ballot to get overseas, we want to reduce that to 20 to 30 milliseconds. that's where we're focusing the efforts. is in taking what has traditionally been a paper based system and having people when i was a voting assistants officer

i read from the book and had everyone fill it out, and then we all sent it in. i mean, we have copied what ovf has done, so we've taken the entire voter registration process and reduced it to a ten-minute process. we think that's a construct that we can take out broadly. so in order to provide greater part of it and have the access to the online ballots and then with the services to provide them greater lectron i think tools to be able to train their voter assistants officers, to be able to get the word out to folks and be able to engage the voters directly. >> based on the methodology that you've used and that's what candace and tom are talking about, we have made measurable progress and we're moving in the right direction, this survey method have been used by the pentagon for how long? >> 25, 30 years. it's called status enforcement survey and they connect a number of the surveys. they're constantly refining it.

one of the advantages we have is that -- >> so you're confident that the data is valid? >> i do. i do. >> all right. before we get into that, hans, i know -- i know this was a softball to you. >> yeah. i hate to be disagreeable, but people who know me know i tend to get in trouble town because i say what i think about things, which is a big no-no. >> that is a problem in this town. >> bob and i are friends, but the methodology, this whole idea there has been this significant improvement, i'm sorry, but the evidence is just not there for that. and the survey that fvap uses, it has been criticized by the gao specifically because it was a survey. they sent out 123,000 survey forms. they got back 15,000. and unlike the data that the eac, the election assistance commission puts together every year where they actually call state officials and get the numbers from them of how many military overseas voters requested absentee ballots, how many did you actually send out, how many did you get in, this is just a survey of people. and what did gao say about the report? they said fvap does not conduct a nonresponse bias analysis that omb says is a necessary step in

determining whether survey findings are biased. not conducting such an analysis limits data reliability. now i don't want to get into a statistical debate here, because statistics is boring. but the point is anybody who does surveys knows that there is bias in who actually sends them back and how accurate the information is when it comes back. the other problem with the samples were that it didn't accurately reflect the overall military population. for example, 25% of the surveys that came back were completed by senior officers and their spouses, even though there are only about 12% of the overall military population. >> but in making that assertion, as i understand, look, surveys are never perfect. >> i know that. but the point is -- >> compare -- wasn't it

weighted? didn't they weight that. >> the gao says they didn't do it, okay. i would argue that we don't have significant evidence of improvement. in fact, the other data from the ec doesn't. i tell you, one of the biggest problems we had in the past two years was i don't know if it's inattention or incompetence for by example the department of justice. i'll give you a quick example of this. the move act was a law passed in october 2009 that was supposed to really improve this. that was the law for example, put in the 45-day requirement that everybody agree was needed for states to send out their absentee ballots before the date. dod sent a request over to doj saying you know there is a waiver provision in the law. states can apply to us for a waiver of the 45-day provision. please send us guidance, because doj is the enforcer. send us guidance on how you intend to enforce the law and

what you think we should take into consideration in granting a waiver. doj never sent them any guidance, and never put out any guidance to the states about how they were going to enforce the law. contrast that with in 2002 when the help america vote act was passed when the doj put out all kinds of guidance on how it was going to enforce the law. dod was supposed to designate particular offices on installations to be the basically the equivalent of voter registration facilities, the same way dmv offices are, the same way public assistance offices are. when did they do that? now remember the laws passed in october 2009. well, they did the designation on november 15th, 2010, two weeks after the election. and there is even a letter i think in march of 2011 in to congress in which they said not

all the branches have done that. and one of the key problems for overseas folks in the military is they move around so much. and so many of the ballots that get sent by election officials here overseas come back with bad addresses. one of the ways to solve that is to make sure that the offices that are on every base that process people coming in who have been transferred, you know like in the navy it was the fleet family services offices, et cetera, when you get to a base, you're given a checklist. you have to go to different offices to take care of housing, pay. well, on that checklist should be one of the office -- whatever office takes care of payroll, whatever office takes care of housing. >> sure, put it on the

checklist. >> that should be the designated voter registration agency. so among the other forms you are to fill out are changes to your address of wherever you are registered or to get registered. instead dod didn't really do that. they picked miscellaneous offices on these bases, places where people don't necessarily go. and again, that's a mistake. it shouldn't have been done. the law needs to be changed. >> let's hold that idea. because i just wanted to highlight that not everyone is in kumbahyah with regard to the data, and that we'll come back to talking about that. and jocelyn, i saved you for this spot because of both your current position and your background. when you look at what they have said, and you understand the situation from a practical standpoint. but i think you understand it from a legal standpoint too. so we have these laws. these laws have been enacted.

the law says we're supposed to provide this. are we doing, knowing what you've heard, are we doing the job that we're supposed to do? are we doing the job? is the job getting done that congress asked to get accomplished. and if so, going back to hans' point, if not, what do we need to do in your mind to change that? or do we need to change the laws? >> i appreciate that. i also want to say thank you to susan for this great gathering today. i know she has done a lot of work. and i appreciate her invitation to serve with this very knowledgeable and esteemed group. i want to take this situation in some ways away from statistics and down to really the level of the voter with my own experience as a military spouse, with a husband stationed on an overseas

base. and the experiences i've seen firsthand. and i'll comment this as an election law attorney, as an election law professor, someone who believes the way in which the infrastructure is built and the laws structure have an impact on who votes. we also know it's much more than that. there are election administration issues there are cultural issues, and there are nonprofit issues that all of which can be improved. and i think we do ourselves a disservice if we just focus on what the federal government can and cannot do better. now, again, from the perspective of someone who has worked with directly with voters overseas on active duty, on bases, trying to get their ballot in, here is an anecdote or a story that illustrates how this plays out at the local level. let's say a soldier is sent overseas to an overseas base in germany or italy, arrives in september after labor day. when you ah live, you don't get

your address right away. and so you can't necessarily request your absentee ballot to be sent to that address right away. now let's say you get sent off on a training mission or assignment as there often are for those serving on an overseas base. you leave that base. and when you come back, let's say you come back the last week of october, the week before election day. under state and federal law you can still request your absentee ballot. that doesn't mean the election administrator at the local level is going to know to transmit that ballot in an electronic way. in fact, in the story i experienced, that didn't happen. the ballot was sent and not sent electronically, even though we specifically asked for it to be sent electronically. it then arrives too late. you don't get your ballot on time. and even if it does arrive, let's say the monday before election day, you have to mail it back. you can't return it back electronically.

and because of that, and it has to arrive, at least in michigan, where i'm based, it has to arrive by 8:00 p.m. on election day. so the practicalities of the federal system, i believe there are improvements. i believe it was a night improvement because it mandates and encourages states to electronically transmit these ballots there. but with the mobility of our service members overseas, you know, there is practicalities that come to minimize the impact of the federal law. now that said, the federal voting assistance program has been very user friendly. i've actually, as i've continued to work to assist these voters and one individual who is my husband on this base, it's actually been great to go to the website. it's very clear. it's very user friendly. but again, that also misses a broader point, which is the overall relevance of voting for these service members overseas, as has been pointed out. and not just for them, for their spouses, many of whom are facing high levels of poverty, are on food stamps, and have many other stresses, kids and all the rest, that take the place just as they do in other communities of voting. and so in order to i think really talk about improving the system, we need to take a holistic approach. we need election administrators to be better trained on compliance with the law. we need i think a stronger message on the local level of the importance of those election administrators in valuing the vote of our overseas voters. but we also need i believe to build a stronger physical presence of the voting community on these bases. right now the information comes to us from television, the armed forces network, commercials, e-mails that we get, and banners

and posters. there needs to be more service member to service member conversations about voting. and in that regard, my organization, the michigan center for election law has developed one program that we're implementing on the local level, recognizing that in engaging voters and educating voters, sometimes the best method is through people they know, people they trust. and to get veterans who recently returned from eof or oif assignments in michigan to reach out to those serving actively, and encourage them to vote, reaching out on facebook, reaching out through electronic means, talking about the issues, encouraging them to vote, we're launching that program for 2012, and we hope that will be an effective way of encouraging the relevance of voting in addition to making the mechanics work better. >> well, thank you. the term culture keeps coming up. that this maybe isn't, with all due respect, the military maybe

isn't a culture which is totally embracing of that whole idea of getting out the vote. maybe it isn't the highest priority. the question we can talk about, and i'm sure we will continue to talk about, is there a problem with the methodology we used to measure what we're doing, or are we really making progress in a culture that is rather tough. i mean, tom, you referenced that as well. this is a tough sled. this isn't like going down to church bizarre and saying here, this is something you need to do. these are people that are in very stressful situations. go ahead. >> we can make, and i think it is our job as advocates to make the ability to vote as easily as possible for these people. but we can't make them vote. we tend to forget also, i think what candace pointed out is one of the most significant things we've said. military voters aren't necessarily voting where they live. i did because i was a californian and i happened to be stationed in california. so it was pretty easy for me. but if you're voting remotely, it's -- the elections aren't about president, senator, or congressman. in fact, those are three ballots on a ballot.

that's usually about a page and a half, two pages long. there are local initiatives, local races, there is all sorts of stuff. and if you're not living in your hometown or your area, you know exactly nothing about that. and it is damn hard to find that unless you're going to look for it. you know, i'm 21-year-old e-4. i'm worried about training myself so i don't get myself killed the next time i go overseas. and, you know, it's not a presidential election. so there is virtually no major media coverage. i'm living in a remote area. and i don't know what propositions 8 through 15 are. i'm going to get this whole ballot. and there might be one person's name i recognize because, you know, it's just not what i'm worried about. to the point about the dod's implementation. i don't know. maybe i've been in d.c. too