Pentagon didn’t fail to send absentee ballots to service members; states send ballots

Some social media users accused the Defense Department of failing to send absentee ballots to overseas personnel ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election.

"BREAKING: The Pentagon reportedly failed to send absentee ballots to active military service members before the election," A Nov. 3 Instagram post said.

The post shared a screenshot of an X post by Patrick Webb, co-founder of Leading Report, a conservative website that has shared misinformation before.

The Instagram post and others like it were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

But the posts are wrong about how overseas active-duty military service members receive and cast their votes. 

The Pentagon has no role in sending absentee ballots. Each state is responsible for managing their election processes, a Pentagon spokesperson said in an email to PolitiFact.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

Military service members and their spouses must request absentee ballots from their home states to vote. They can do so through the Defense Department’s Federal Voting Assistance Program. 

The program provides voting assistance for service members, their families and other people living overseas. Voters can use the site to register to vote, request state ballots and navigate election dates and deadlines.

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Webb’s X post, which was tagged with a community note pointing out that the Pentagon doesn’t send ballots, provides more context behind the claim. Webb responded to the note by pointing to an Oct. 30 letter sent by Reps. Brian Mast, R-Fla., Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and Mike Waltz R-Fla., to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

The representatives said in the letter that active-duty service members had raised concerns about the Pentagon’s "inadequate education" on how to vote and that when some members whose mail ballots did not arrive in time requested a federal write-in ballot, they were told the base had run out. Webb, in another X post, said the Pentagon is responsible for providing those ballots.

But that misunderstands how the write-in ballot option works. 

Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Pat Ryder said at a Nov. 4 briefing that the Pentagon has a "robust education program in terms of getting the word out on how service members and their families" can vote.

If a service member’s absentee ballot sent by the state doesn’t arrive in time, members can use the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot available online as a backup, Ryder said.

A service member using that ballot doesn’t need to request it from their military base. They can print the ballots out themselves from the Federal Voting Assistance Program website. The program’s website on Nov. 5 included information on how to access the backup ballot.

Instagram posts claimed the Pentagon "failed to send absentee ballots to active military service members before the election." But the Pentagon doesn’t send absentee ballots to overseas members. Individual states send mail ballots to service members overseas.

If those ballots don’t arrive in time, service members can print out federal write-in absentee ballots to cast their votes.

The claim is False.