The Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF) hosted its Sixth Annual UOCAVA Summit last week, where participants highlighted progress made and noted the challenges that still remain in ensuring that military and overseas voters can successfully cast their absentee ballots.
A new report from the Pew Center on the States noted in the past two years, 47 states and the District of Columbia enacted laws to protect the voting rights of military and overseas citizens. This year’s election will be the first presidential election since many of these changes went into effect. The report, Democracy from Afar, found that many states have implemented changes to their laws or administrative codes.
… The summit also saw OVF announce the creation of the U.S. Vote Foundation, a new domestic voter engagement initiative which will provide U.S. citizens with access to innovative voter registration tools and services. “It’s time to provide U.S.-based voters with the same breadth and quality of online voter services that we have been providing to overseas and military voters for more than five years,” said OVF President and CEO Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat in a press release. And in an attempt to establish a reliable count of Americans living outside the United States, initial research was presented by the Federal Voting Assistance Program about its Overseas Citizens Count Project.
Other participants focused on the difficulties faced in increasing military voter participation and what data can best be used to monitor how states serve military and overseas voters. And Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation (CVF) presented new data showing room for improvement when it comes to the information state election websites provide military and overseas voters.
Full Article: electionlineWeekly.