America is a great democracy, so why can't we figure out how to vote? Many and varied are the shortcomings of our voting system(s), but two are especially evident.

One is the downright disenfranchising system of absentee balloting that confronts U.S. troops stationed or deployed abroad. More often than not, according to a news story this week, their votes are never even tallied. It's almost as if the election system is at war with the troops.

The other is the long lines many Americans in urban areas are forced to endure on Election Day.

We've all become familiar with scenes of fellow citizens standing patiently for hours outside big-city polling places. Familiarity, in this case, seems to breed an acceptance of an intolerable but entirely fixable situation. There's no reason -- other than added cost, which shouldn't count -- why officials can't provide enough voting booths and election personnel so that the process takes no more time at an inner-city precinct than it does in a suburb.

At least in the cities, most Americans' votes eventually get counted, even if judges have to intervene to keep snarled polling places open late. That's not the case for our far-flung service personnel. The Associated Press reports that in the 2006 election, about 70 percent of overseas military ballots were never recorded. Either they arrived late at the polling places (the mail-in process can eat up two months) or were out of compliance with one of the many confounding rules that govern the 50 states' voting processes.

The problem with counting military votes isn't new, as veterans of the 2000 election count in Florida will recall. But it persists despite efforts to solve it, including the Pentagon's spending $25 million on an online system in 2004, only to give up. The answer ultimately does lie in the Internet, using either a centralized voting system for troops abroad (plugging into precinct-level ballot choices) or through intensified efforts by the states to give military voters a much higher priority and a clearer route to effective participation in the democratic system that they're protecting.

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