on the overseas vote

estimates say that there are about 500,000 overseas military votes, the majority of which will go to bush. then, there are another 1,000,000 overseas civilian votes. ready to play the 'how will they disenfranchise us now game?'

from salon.com
Oct. 21, 2004 BERLIN --
Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat is pumped. Two weeks ago, sitting in an Internet cafe on Munich's Odeonplatz, the software marketer who crafted a hugely successful voter registration Web site, pulls up numbers that show a remarkable spike in Americans overseas mobilizing to defeat George W. Bush. Between her site and another out of Hong Kong, Democrats have registered 140,000 new voters, 40 percent of them from swing states -- and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Americans abroad, roused to a boiling fury by a Bush doctrine that has smeared America's good name across the globe, are looking like the "silent swing vote" in several key battleground states. Overseas registration for both parties is up by 400 percent over 2000; estimates put the tally of possible civilian votes as high as 2 million.

Then the panicked e-mails start flooding in. Today, less than two weeks before the tightest presidential race in memory, untold thousands of overseas voters still have not received their ballots -- and clearly won't be able to get them back in time. Late primaries and legal challenges to Ralph Nader's appearance on the ballot delayed mailings from half the battleground states. In swing states, including Florida, Ohio and New Mexico, different versions of the ballot have gone out, sowing wild confusion. In Pennsylvania alone, at least three versions were mailed overseas, in successive, chaotic waves -- with Nader and without him, plus a blank one-size-fits-all ballot with no names at all.

Activists now fear that huge numbers of Americans overseas -- both military and civilian -- may be as disenfranchised as they were in 2000, when anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of overseas ballots, depending on the county, just plain never showed up. But, far from helping civilians, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, has dragged its feet. A small liaison office based in the Pentagon, the FVAP provides voting materials to the departments of Defense and State for soldiers and civilians abroad and preaches overseas election law to thousands of local election officials back home.