MILITARY Mail delay is raising concerns about vote

A lawmaker is pressing for reform of the military mail system.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- The military can pinpoint a target the size of coffee cup from thousands of miles away. It can whisk a special forces team to a beachhead within hours.
What it can't do, despite decades of trying, is deliver the mail on time to troops in a combat zone. It usually takes at least a month, maybe even three or four, according to the General Accounting Office.
"Next to food and bullets, what we hear they want is mail from home, and that's extremely important for morale," said Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican.
To make matters worse this year, the military's absentee voting system, which depends on the timely delivery of mail, is in equally bad shape, according to the Pentagon's inspector general.
Both issues could add up to problems in the November election, especially with a presidential contest that could be decided by a razor-thin margin. Bond said he is worried that many of the ballots from troops overseas won't get counted.
"The military just doesn't have its act together," he said.
Request for changes
Bond has been peppering Pentagon officials, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on down, with letters urging them to modernize the mail system to avoid a repeat of the 2000 election, when absentee military ballots in Florida became pivotal to President Bush's victory over Al Gore.
Sam Wright, director of the nonprofit Military Voting Rights Project, said there often is "not sufficient time for ballots to go from election officials to the voter and back, especially if the voter is in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan or a ship at sea, or worse, a submarine under the sea."
Last month, a federal court ordered Pennsylvania to extend until May 17 its deadline for overseas voters to cast ballots in the state's April 27 primary. The Justice Department asked for the extension because the state did not send out absentee ballots soon enough for voters to return them by the primary.
Twenty-nine states require absentee ballots to be returned by mail. Others allow faxes.
Wright said the solution is voting by Internet, but earlier this year the Pentagon canceled a plan to do so because of security concerns.
"The result is at least one more presidential election with absentee voting by 'snail mail,'" he said.
Mail statistics
The General Accounting Office reported that troops in Iraq received more than 65 million pounds of mail in 2003. Last summer, the Air Force Times reported, the mail backup was enough to cover three football fields with letters and packages stacked 10 feet high.
The GAO said delivery problems surfaced early in the Iraq war, but measuring the timeliness of the mail service was difficult because the military did not have "a reliable, accurate system in place."
Although the delivery times for test letters fell within 12-18 days -- the "current wartime standard," the report said -- actual delivery times were at least a month and sometimes as long as four. Many troops also said that they never received mail that they knew had been sent to them.
Problems with mail and voting are not new in the military. More than a half-century ago, President Harry S. Truman complained to Congress of the "patchwork quilt of complicated and conflicting regulations" that denied many troops the opportunity to vote.
More recently, a Defense Department task force in 2000 recommended outsourcing "much, if not all" of the military mail service to the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Service replied that it could not handle the extra work and suggested civilian contractors as an option.
In 2001, the General Accounting Office looked at military voting and found that nearly two-thirds of the absentee ballots disqualified in the 2000 election were rejected because of tardiness or improper completion.