Robert Timothy Reagan

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires the federal and state governments to facilitate overseas citizens' participation in federal elections. This includes enabling overseas citizens to register and vote. In particular, jurisdictions must be able to send out absentee ballots to overseas voters at least forty-five days before federal elections.The enfranchisement of overseas voters began with military personnel, extended to their families, and then extended to citizens who are overseas for other reasons. An overseas citizen is typically eligible to vote in the last location of a stateside domicile.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was Congress's reaction to issues that arose during the 2000 presidential election and the ensuing controversial Florida recount. President George W. Bush signed HAVA into law on October 29, 2002.HAVA includes standards for provisional ballots, which help prevent the consequences of erroneous purges of voter registration rolls. Instead of turning away eligible voters, polls permit those whose registrations are in question to cast provisional ballots that are counted if it turns out that they were eligible to vote. HAVA also sets minimum standards for voting equipment used in federal elections.

This annotated guide describes special case-management issues that typically arise in national security cases. Guide text is followed by instructive examples drawn from a selection of cases that are more fully described in a companion publication, National Security Case Studies: Special Case-Management Challenges (Federal Judicial Center 2011).National Security Case Studies includes an illustrative and instructive selection of cases concerning national security issues that have appeared in Article III courts. Many of the lessons derived from these cases came from close examinations of the case files and from interviews with presiding judges-especially with respect to case-management issues that are not always written up in published opinions.