22Apr
“Trump gutted the VA, slashed veterans’ benefits, and fired the federal workers who process veterans’ claims. Now he wants to control whether we can vote. Common Defense will not allow it.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Yesterday, President Trump released an Executive Order to exert federal control over voter rolls and mail-in ballots. These undemocratic calls to eliminate voting access for millions of Americans are extremely alarming and pose a direct threat to the freedom that veterans across the country have fought for.
In response, Naveed Shah, Political Director of Common Defense issued the following statement:
“Service members have voted by mail since the Civil War. It is not a loophole, it is how our military has participated in democracy for over 150 years. Trump just signed an order that threatens to end that.
“Nearly three-quarters of active duty service members are eligible to vote absentee because they are stationed away from their voting residence. They are deployed. Mail-in voting is their only option.
“The DHS database at the center of this order is the same broken system that has already wrongly identified U.S. citizens as ineligible, including naturalized veterans who served this country before they were even citizens. A faulty government database will now decide whether a deployed soldier gets a ballot, or a disabled veteran. That is not election integrity. This is voter suppression and it’s a slap in the face of the freedoms veterans and servicemembers have fought to defend.
“Trump gutted the VA, slashed veterans’ benefits, and fired the federal workers who process veterans’ claims. Now he wants to control whether we can vote. Common Defense will not allow it.”
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Common Defense Civic Engagement (501c4) (CDCE) is a grassroots, veteran-led organization that was founded in 2016. We empower veterans to stand up for our communities against the rising tide of racism, hate, and violence, to organize against the entrenched powers that have rigged our economy, and to champion an equitable and representative democracy, where “liberty and justice” truly is for all. For too long, politicians from both political parties have attempted to use veterans as unwilling political props, and Common Defense serves as a home for veterans to organize and speak for themselves and support the candidates who truly share our values.