September 2, 2008 - West Virginia Secretary of State Betty Ireland says she wants to make sure military service men and women are registered to vote and know how they can vote, even if they are currently on active duty.

Ireland's Office has teamed with members of the Department of Defense for Armed Services Voting Week which started Monday and lasts through Saturday.

"Those people ought to have their voices heard, and certainly at the ballot box," says Secretary of State Ireland.  "We have teamed up with the Department of Defense and this is available to any state that wants to do this. It's not just a West Virginia initiative."

The Department of Defense will provide new options for military personnel to get registered and request absentee ballots through fax and e-mail to the Secretary of State's Office.  You can find the forms you need at www.FVAP.org, the website for the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

"In fact, we just talked to someone who had just gotten back from deployment in Iraq," Secretary Ireland explains. "She had used her voting assistance officer in Iraq to vote in the primary earlier in May of this year."

The ballot will come from the Department of Defense to the individual counties in West Virginia and Secretary Ireland assures military personnel that this is a safe way to vote.

"The Department of Defense has worked years on getting the security measures for this in place and we think it's going to work very, very well," says Secretary Ireland.

Ireland estimates that there are more two thousand people from West Virginia who are eligible to vote overseas serving in the military currently.