Paul Lux has had a singular goal since joining the Okaloosa County Elections Office more than a decade ago. As a veteran, he has worked to streamline the delivery of absentee ballots to Florida’s overseas military voters. Okaloosa is home to several military installations including Eglin Air Force Base.
"We are still conducting absentee ballots for our military voters exactly the same way we’ve been doing it since the civil war in the 1860s", said Lux. "A soldier mails me a request for a ballot and hopes that I get it, I mail him a ballot and hope that he gets it, and then he mails it back to me in the hopes that I get it in time to count it. We’ve been doing this since the US Civil war. We’ve put men on the moon, we have probes on Mars we have internet on our phones...All my candidates do their filing electronically finance reporting. All of this stuff is out there. And yet we’re telling the very people who are defending our freedoms sorry that’s not good enough for you to use."So when a 2010 federal grant was created to study delivering ballots electronically overseas, Lux – now supervisor of elections for Okaloosa - wanted to participate.
"I was disappointed to discover two things", Lux said. "Number one that you had to be a state to apply for the money and number two, my state wasn’t interested in applying for any of the money and managing the grant."
Undeterred, Lux convinced the Federal Voting Assistance Program to allow local jurisdictions to apply for grants the next year. He put together a coalition of 13 Florida counties that delivered 2012 ballots electronically to their overseas – absentee voters. The law says ballots must be sent out to overseas voters within 45 days of an election. Lux says electronic delivery makes that easier.
"What they don’t calculate into that 45 days is that's how long it takes it to get to the APO destination", explained Lux. "But if you're in a unit in Afghanistan and you're working in a forward-deployed area from the main base, and the chopper is leaving to bring supplies to your base and I've got a mail bag and a box of ammo, guess which one has higher priority getting on the helicopter? It ain't the mailbag."
The Florida coalition Lux put together has grown with a second grant and now includes 34 Florida counties covering all but two military installations in the state – MacDill and Patrick air force bases.
Instead of emailing ballots, the coalitions’ system allows overseas absentee voters to log onto their county’s special database which serves as requesting an absentee ballot. They then can mark the ballot electronically and print it out, or print out a blank ballot and vote by hand.
Lux says that half the battle is making voting more accessible to Florida’s deployed military. The other half - returning the ballots - is still done the old fashion way Lux says.
The laws do not allow internet voting. So, the overseas absentee voters have only two options - to return the ballot via postal mail or if overseas –their ballot can be faxed.
That’s Paul Lux’s next goal - finding a secure way for the electronic return of ballots.