Acrobat - Texas Secretary Of State: Fill & Download for Free

Yes. In 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed into law a bill that amended the Texas Administrative Code. Title 1, Part 4, Chapter 81, Subchapter B, rule 35 says:(a) A person who meets the eligibility requirements of a voter under the Texas Election Code, Chapter 101, but who will be on a space flight during the early-voting period and on election day, may vote under this chapter. In order to vote by this method, the voter must apply by a Federal Postcard Application ("FPCA") and meet the requisite deadlines under state law. The FPCA may be submitted by fax or other electronic means.(b) The National Aeronautics and Space Administration ("NASA") shall submit in writing to the Secretary of State a method of transmitting and receiving a secret ballot for persons on a space flight during an election period. The Secretary of State shall approve, deny, or request further information from NASA on the proposed method of transmission.(c) Proposed changes to an approved ballot transmission method shall be submitted in writing to the Secretary of State for approval.In 1996, NASA Astronaut John Blaha was aboard the Russian space station Mir during the election. He was not able to exercise his right to vote. The issue was raised to the local state representatives and the bill was in place a year later.If an astronaut is registered to vote and will be in space during the election period, the Harris, Brazoria, or Galveston county clerk (whichever county the astronaut resides) will send an encrypted Adobe Acrobat PDF copy of the ballot to NASA. NASA will send it up the astronaut. The astronaut will fill it in and send it back down (still encrypted) and it will be sent to the county voting officer, who will be able to open the ballot and translate the selections to an actual ballot.

Yes. In 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed into law a bill that amended the Texas Administrative Code. Title 1, Part 4, Chapter 81, Subchapter B, rule 35 says:(a) A person who meets the eligibility requirements of a voter under the Texas Election Code, Chapter 101, but who will be on a space flight during the early-voting period and on election day, may vote under this chapter. In order to vote by this method, the voter must apply by a Federal Postcard Application ("FPCA") and meet the requisite deadlines under state law. The FPCA may be submitted by fax or other electronic means.(b) The National Aeronautics and Space Administration ("NASA") shall submit in writing to the Secretary of State a method of transmitting and receiving a secret ballot for persons on a space flight during an election period. The Secretary of State shall approve, deny, or request further information from NASA on the proposed method of transmission.(c) Proposed changes to an approved ballot transmission method shall be submitted in writing to the Secretary of State for approval.In 1996, NASA Astronaut John Blaha was aboard the Russian space station Mir during the election. He was not able to exercise his right to vote. The issue was raised to the local state representatives and the bill was in place a year later.If an astronaut is registered to vote and will be in space during the election period, the Harris, Brazoria, or Galveston county clerk (whichever county in which the astronaut resides) will send an encrypted Adobe Acrobat PDF copy of the ballot to NASA. NASA will send it up the astronaut. The astronaut will fill it in and send it back down (still encrypted) and it will be sent to the county voting officer, whom will be able to open the ballot and translate the selections to an actual ballot.

The Philippines was never considered by Americans to be a true “possession” of the United States, in the sense of the European colonial empires. As a republic, the United States prided itself on not being European and not wanting a colonial empire. The Native American tribes within the boundaries of the United States were treated as scattered wards of the American government who would eventually become Americans. Assimilated into American society, just as had the Spanish, British, French, and Mexican inhabitants of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, Texas, California, and the desert Southwest.Given the opportunity to conquer parts of settled Canada in 1812, American militia often refused to cross the international border. The Mexican War in 1845 was considered a criminal act by many in the United States. President Polk’s suggestion that the United States annex heavily populated Mexican provinces in 1848 was resisted in the congress and among the citizens. Opponents of empire considered ruling over vast numbers of foreigners “un-american,” European, and evil. Further, prejudiced Americans did not want millions of semi-illiterate Catholic, “non-white” peasants to suddenly be made American citizens.This balance of opinions kept the American government from becoming involved in the world-wide land-grabbing of European nations for the next half-century. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, it was to liberate Cuba and drive the last significant European empire from the Western Hemisphere.There was an American internationalist movement with a serious imperialist faction. This faction, in which Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was a leader, wished to assert American power overseas to advance the nation’s foreign trade. They also wanted to create a large American navy and acquire foreign naval bases for that navy to give the United States more influence in the world. This policy went forward, in 1898, not secretly, but still screened by the higher goal of liberating Cuba.The United States conquered the Philippines from Spain in 1898 to build a coaling station and a harbor to maintain its Pacific naval squadron. The four years of war that followed could have been avoided if the American government had been less divided in its motives and had planned its policy in the Philippines better. It should have been ready to offer the Filipino Independence movement an arrangement similar to that it intended for Cuba.Filipinos revolted in 1898 because the American officials involved in the transfer of power from Spain to the United States had not considered that they would resist being “liberated” from Spain by another foreign power. The Americans and Filipinos were both aware that the Philippines, and particularly the fine harbor at Manila, were being targeted directly by the British and Germans foreign offices and tentatively by every other colonial power, including the rising power of Japan. The British and Germans had cruiser squadrons in Manila Bay days after the victory of Commodore Dewey’s American squadron over the Spanish. Dewey and the British naval commander eventually had to threaten the Germans with another naval battle if they persisted in undercutting American negotiations with the Filipinos.The Filipino-American War saw many terrible actions by the American army to suppress the independence movement. As Americans grew aware of this, many were outraged at the crimes being committed in their name. Theodore Roosevelt, now president of the United States, was also appalled by the bloodshed and suffering, as well as the damage being done to America’s reputation and his. William Howard Taft, the American Governor of the Philippines, was empowered to negotiate a settlement.Taft’s compromise made the Philippines a de facto American protectorate, with limited autonomy, investment in government and economic infrastructure, and full independence at some future time when the colonial empires already dominating Asia were no longer a threat. The Americans kept their military bases around Manila. Legislation passed in the American congress over the next few decades ended American administrative power in the Philippines. By 1934 the Philippine Independence Act made the Philippines fully autonomous, with the official end to American sovereignty scheduled for 1944 and the removal of the American military bases scheduled for 1946.This schedule was badly compromised by the Japanese, who began planning to take the Philippines away from the Americans soon after 1898.By 1905, the threat the superior Japanese navy posed to the American position in East Asia caused Taft, then Secretary of War, to arrange an unofficial compromise: the Americans would mute their criticism of the Japanese aggression in Korea if Japan would cease to plot aggression against the Philippines. The establishment of this agreement on policy kept the Japanese at bay for several decades. However, as militarists seized control of the Japanese government in the 1930s, Japan began planning to expand its empire in the Pacific.The Japanese navy wanted the Philippines. Tentatively, the Imperial Naval Staff planned for an invasion of the Philippines in 1948, two years after the last American naval forces were withdrawn. At that point, the American navy would have no bases in the Pacific nearer to Manila then Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, five thousand miles distant.In 1940, rising tensions over the Japanese invasion of China caused the militarist government in Tokyo to consider a war with the United States to end its support of China. Nazi Germany conquered France in June, and the Americans passed a “Two-Ocean Navy Bill” to create a vast new fleet to defend itself against both Nazi Germany and Japan. Supporting Britain in its war with Germany was part of American defensive strategy, leading, in March of 1941, to the Lend Lease Act, which allowed the United States to proclaim its neutrality while underwriting the British and Chinese war efforts with billions of dollars in war material. Germany and Italy decided to declare war on the United States, but wanted Japan to join them. Japan was still hesitant to attack the Americans, who had ten times its industrial capacity, but the Japanese navy refused to consider a war in the Pacific without Japanese control of the Philippines.Japan eventually attacked the United States, with guarantees of German and Italian support, in December of 1941. They invaded the Philippines a few days after attacking Pearl Harbor. Americans and Filipinos fought the Japanese invaders side by side for six months before surrendering their armies. Filipino and American resistance fighters carried on the struggle against the Japanese for four years. In 1944 and 1945, the Americans returned to the Philippines in great strength and fought to liberate it, week after week, until the Japanese surrender in September of 1945.The official year of Filipino independence, which had been 1944, was delayed two years by the Japanese invasion. Because of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, the American military facilities near Manila stayed open throughout the Cold War, closing in 1992.Addenda:As an example of how little the Spanish administration had penetrated the Philippines in three hundred years, consider the problems Manuel Quezon and Douglas MacArthur had forming a national government and military in the 1930s . . .More than anything else, language proved to be an almost insurmountable barrier. It was not unusual for men in one company to speak at least six different dialects, each of which was unintelligible to the other, a military Tower of Babel that guaranteed frustration and inertia . . .A cadre of forty American officers and twenty American NCOs or Philippine Scouts served as the skeleton around which each division was formed. Weapons, ammo, and infrastructure were all substandard. “The men had no individual entrenching tools,” Major Malcolm Fortier, an adviser to the 41st Infantry Division, later wrote. Uniforms were shabby. Leather footgear was ill-suited for the wide tendencies of local feet, causing such bad blisters that, according to Fortier, “many men went bare foot rather than wear them ” . . .Language and cultural problems persisted even for units composed of men from the same region. “They spoke eleven different dialects,” Colonel Glen Townsend, commander of the 11th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Division, later said. “Christian and Pagan had little liking for each other. Although all the enlisted personnel had taken the prescribed five and a half months [of] training, they were proficient only in close-order drill and saluting. The officers, being mainly political appointees, had less training than the men they were supposed to lead.” One of his machine-gun companies proved to be a near total loss because the troops could not begin to communicate with one another. Townsend’s officers resorted to using sign language and diagrams. This reduced training, in the estimation of one captain to “demonstration, application, and supervision.” In another unit, the language gap also bordered on the ridiculous. American officers gave instructions in English to Filipino officers who then translated to their sergeants in Tagalog, who, in turn, translated the Tagalog instructions into a local dialect.Once the Japanese invaders landed, Americans and Filipinos learned on the job quickly enough. Note that the Filipino Scouts, the most professional unit in the allied army, had the traditional colonial organization of American officers and enlisted men salted into a majority of Filipino volunteers. Japanese bullets and shrapnel were indifferent to those distinctions . . .Fierce combat ensued, especially near the once quaint roadside town of Abucay. The brunt of the Japanese assault hit at the juncture of the 41st Division and the 57th Infantry Regiment. The latter was a superb, well-armed regiment of Scouts from the Philippine Division. In the eerie darkness, aided by artillery and mortar fire, the Japanese attacked. “Screaming ‘Banzai,’ in a frenzied fashion, the leading men hurled themselves on the barbed wire and made bridges of their bodies over which the remainder passed,” Captain John Olson, the regimental adjutant, later wrote: “The wire almost became invisible under the weight of dead bodies. They were piled so high our machine guns didn’t have any more field of fire,” PFC Wilburn Snyder said. “We killed them with pistols as they came over. It was horrible. They came with these shrill cries. You killed them or you didn’t stop them.” To Captain Ernest Brown, a company commander, the stunted sugarcane field in front of his unit’s defensive line seemed to “vomit Japanese in great numbers, screaming, howling, yelling ‘Banzai’ as they charged. They continued to come, threw themselves against our wire, and the waves behind them leaped on their comrades up and over. It seemed they were acrobats in the manner they crossed the moon lit stretch of ground between the cane field and our position.” In some cases, enemy soldiers jumped onto the box mines, blowing themselves up to create craters in which others took cover. Artillery shells shrieked in and exploded, sending hot fragments in every direction, blowing some of the Japanese infantrymen to bits. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Fry, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 57th Infantry later said the artillery fire was the “sweetest music I have ever heard.” Seventy-five-millimeter batteries from the Scouts’ 24th Field Artillery Battalion fired from ranges of three hundred yards or less, so close that the gun shields were dented by Japanese bullets. The infantry Scouts added devastating sheets of machine-gun and rifle fire to the roiling mass of running and jumping enemy soldiers.McManus, John C.. Fire and Fortitude. Penguin Publishing Group.