Thursday, December 07, 2006

2004 Election.

It was right around election time…Bush vs. Kerry, any kid in the Army with some sense wanted Kerry to win even if they didn’t like him. Everyone in my unit was given an absentee ballot and told to vote. My friends and I all voted for Kerry. I personally didn’t care for him but who was I going to vote for? Some asshole who takes 10 minutes to spit out a sentence and wanted to send me to war? No thank you. We held onto our ballots for about a week or so. We thought the higher ups would collect them and mail them out as a unit. We were wrong. After training one night, we were all watching Black Hawk Down and one of our Sergeant Majors came in and asked, “Did you mail in your ballots? Did you vote?”. A bunch of us sat there confused…some of us even had the ballots in our pockets…but we were too late. The Sergeant Major told us they had to be in the mail that afternoon. Do you know what that’s like? The whole time I was thinking…this ballot is my ticket out of war…Kerry just needs to win…maybe we won’t get sent over or if we do maybe we’ll leave early. But no…I was late…a lot of us were. Our hope was thrown out the window. We ripped up the ballots and prayed America would be smart enough not to reelect Bush. I guess they weren’t.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What a load of bullshit. But, almost the exact thing happened to me when I was active duty.

I went to my voting right orifacer and hold him that I wanted to vote in. He said he'd get back to me. That was in 1992, I'm still waiting.

12/11/2006 12:53:00 AM  
Blogger GI Kate said...

haha we'll its good to know somethings just don't change.

12/31/2006 12:16:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for sharing your stories. I only just learned of your site. Thank you for your service as well.

Regarding your story about 2004 election, I find myself utterly confused! Perhaps my memory is wrong, but I thought the military was voting electronically and at the time in 2004, European Americans (Americans living in Europe) were not able to vote electronically (via the web) because they somehow limited the servors to keep them open for the military vote.

Here is a page of links that might help give you an idea of what was happening in 04.

http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/Default.aspx?tabid=104


Have all of us been hoodwinked?

1/07/2007 09:24:00 AM  
Blogger GI Kate said...

you're welcome...thanks for reading!

i dont know anything about that. during the election i was at Ft. Dix...so we were still using absentee ballots or attempting to use them. :)

1/08/2007 05:08:00 PM  
Blogger Scott said...

Here is some info collected about the difficulty in troops voting. I'm still seeking a resolution myself.

http://www.myspace.com/troopscantvote

3/17/2008 02:03:00 AM  

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