Right now, there are tens of thousands of service members fighting overseas to defend our rights and freedoms. One of America’s most cherished rights is the right to vote. There was a very loud outcry when New York officials somehow missed the deadline to send out military ballots. Well, first it was New York, and now it’s Illinois. And Illinois has miraculously managed to be even more outrageous than New York.
While 35 counties failed to mail the military ballots in time, election officials made sure that inmates get the chance to vote by hand delivering ballots to prisons. So those are the priorities in Illinois, huh?
The men and women who are putting their lives on the line for us aren’t important enough to get ballots sent to on time, but criminals get theirs hand delivered.
Over 35 counties in Illinois missed the deadline to mail military ballots to our soldiers defending America. But in Chicago, county election officials have taken special steps to ensure that no inmates at the Cook County Jail are unable to cast a ballot.
The Chicago Board of Elections hand delivers ballots to the jail. They don’t even wait for the inmates to apply – they bring the applications with the ballots! Over 2,600 inmates have cast ballots so far – strikingly similiar to the 2,600 soldiers who will likely not recieve a ballot for the Nov 2 election.
It’s bad enough that we have several states letting something as simple as mailing military ballots get screwed up. But Illinois takes shameful to a whole new level. About 2,900 ballots were not sent out, yet election officials still have no formal plan to ensure military votes are counted.
But hey, don’t worry — they’ve got the prisoners covered!
Strangely enough, could the fact that New York and Illinois are both overwhelmingly Democratic states have factored in to this whole military ballot controversy? Military votes, after all, tend to swing Republican. In a corrupt state like Illinois, I wouldn’t put it past them.
Curiously (or maybe not so curiously), this is the city and state that Obama calls home. But where’s the outrage from the Commander-in-Chief? Is he making statements on cable television wanting to know “whose ass to kick” to get this issue resolved? You’d think he wouldn’t stand for this, but apparently he’s too busy smearing the Chamber of Commerce and planning his post-election vacation to care about fighting for the rights of the servicemembers who put their lives on the line to defends ours.
