I was just catching up on the news in the airport, and found this interesting story out of Virginia, “US troops face hurdles to voting.”

The story focuses mainly on military voters, something that Thad and I wrote about recently with Brian Roberts, “Military Voters and the Law: Procedural and Technological Solutions to the Ballot Transit Problem.”

Some of the numbers from the newspaper story linked to above put some real meat to the potential problem in Virginia:

About 4.7 million Virginians are registered to vote, and 42,189 active-duty members of the armed forces make Virginia their legal residence for voting. During the presidential election, more than 900 state Guard troops will be on deployment outside the country, said Lt. Col. Thom Morgan of the Virginia National Guard.

Last week I was speaking with a colleague who is closely following the presidential election, and trying to figure out where the battleground states will be in November. One of the states that this colleague said was one to watch was Virginia … if Virginia is close this fall, we could hear more about any issues that Virginia’s active-duty military duty personnel face when they try to register and vote.