Army Capt. Christopher Kent is helping Afghanistan stand on some pretty wobbly legs. Before now, democracy there never got much a workout.
Kent, 39, and his unit have done their part to kick-start it. Working with the Afghan army, they just finished a voter-registration drive in the north-Central province of Ghor. They guarded registration centers. They made the place safe for democracy in the most concrete terms.
The big test comes in January, in a national election.
Kent’s participation in a much more stable democracy is another story. He didn’t vote Nov. 4. It wasn’t a matter of apathy. He simply couldn’t a get ballot. He requested one by mail through the proper channels — the military voting officer.
“I haven’t seen anything yet,” Kent said. “We are very remote, and we receive mail very sporadically. Think ‘bag kicked out of a moving airplane.’ ”
By remote, Kent means a front-line camp with no paved roads, surrounded by 13,00-foot peaks. In an e-mail, he wrote about his role in the Afghan voter-registration drive. And he answered questions via e-mail about his own unsuccessful efforts to vote.
One soldier in the unit received a ballot. His vote, however, didn’t count, Kent said. The next outgoing mail run was Nov. 7, three days after the election.
It wasn’t first time Kent missed a vote. During the 2004 presidential election, he was too busy fighting Iraqi insurgents. He led an infantry platoon in the Battle of Fallujah.
“I don’t fault anyone for missing that one,” Kent said. “It would have been insane to expose anyone to that level of risk to deliver or retrieve an absentee ballot.”
Two months later, he helped get out the vote in Iraq’s first post-Saddam election. His platoon provided helicopter cover against insurgent rocket attacks on Baghdad polling places.
That’s one irony he can overlook. But Afghanistan was different, Kent said. More could have been done to give front-line soldiers the vote. He suggests something of a double-standard at play: Troops in larger camps behind the lines enjoy ice cream, movies and the right to vote; Troops on the front lines have been disenfranchised.
“The kicker is that the soldiers with the most personal stake in political outcome — more specifically, diplomatic failure — want to be politically active, but can’t,” Kent said.
As for himself, Kent said the latest election held no particular significance. But principles matter, he adds.
“I feel very left out of the process I have sworn to defend — and establish elsewhere.”
All the same, he has no complaints about service to his country. He started in 1989 as an enlistee and rose to an officer’s rank with the Arizona National Guard in 2002. Since September 2001, he’s spent half his time on active duty, said his wife, Cara. They have two daughters, ages 7 and 1. When at home in Tucson, Kent is a police officer.
One state senator from Phoenix did look into his case. Debbie McCune Davis,
D-14, went to the Arizona Secretary of State’s office — not as a politician but as Kent’s mother-in-law. She asked if Capt. Kent could get a ballot electronically.
He could, by filling out an absentee ballot request on a federal form, available online, said Deputy Secretary of State Kevin Tyne. County elections officials then provide a secure ballot electronically. Soldiers can print it, fill it out, scan it and upload it to the Secretary of State’s Web site.
 “They could do that in a day,” Tyne said.
If they don’t have a scanner, they can fax it.
The electronic option apparently wasn’t much help to Kent. His Internet connection in Ghor is sporadic at best.
His mother-in-law mentioned another hang-up.
“He doesn’t have a fax machine.”