Republicans filed lawsuits in three crucial battleground states in the past week to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including military members, arguing that some votes are particularly susceptible to fraud.
Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan voting experts vigorously defended the previously uncontroversial voting rules abroad, arguing that the lawsuits amounted to attempts to further lay the groundwork to question the veracity of next month’s election results to cast doubt.
The Republican National Committee last week sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan, saying they had illegal rules on their books that extended voting rights abroad to people whose residency in those states had not been verified.
And in a lawsuit filed last week in federal court, a group of Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania made similar accusations, arguing that overseas ballots in the state are at risk of fraud because those voters are not required to meet the same voter identification requirements like other voters. absent voters do.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit, filed by Republican Reps. Guy Reschenthaler, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Lloyd Smucker and Mike Kelly against Republican Secretary of State Al Schmidt, alleged that Schmidt issued directives to local election officials in the state, causing some U.S. citizens abroad could vote – a group that also includes military personnel – who should be exempt from voter identification requirements.
The GOP lawsuits against the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson alleged that officials in those states repeated similar rules, which Republicans alleged expanded voter qualifications to people who are not covered by federal law designed to protect the right. to vote for many Americans living abroad.
That law, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), requires states to allow eligible Americans living abroad to vote in federal elections. Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina are among a group of states that do not require such voters to identify themselves in order to mail in a ballot.
“The votes of North Carolinians and Michiganders should not be revoked by those who never lived in the state in the first place – plain and simple. This is illegal and we will put an end to it,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement earlier this week announcing the lawsuits in those two states.
Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for North Carolina’s bipartisan State Board of Elections, said the state’s approach to voting abroad has been law for 13 years and that without it, North Carolinians living abroad would not could vote in federal elections.
“Plaintiffs challenged a state law that allows U.S. citizens living abroad to vote in elections in North Carolina when these voters’ only residential connection to a U.S. state is through their parents’ former residence in North Carolina,” said Gannon. “Otherwise, these American citizens would have no other way to vote in the American elections. North Carolina lawmakers passed this law more than thirteen years ago as a way to implement a federal law that required states to make voting more accessible to military families and other citizens living abroad.”
“This lawsuit was filed after voting had already begun in North Carolina for the general election. The time to challenge voter eligibility rules is well before the election, not after votes have already been cast,” he added.
Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State, said in a statement that the lawsuit “is not a legitimate legal concern” but rather is “just the latest in the RNC’s public relations campaign to promote unfounded distrust in the integrity of our to sow elections. “
“It is disappointing to see a national political party trying to disenfranchise our military families, but unfortunately at this point it is not surprising,” she added. “We will continue our work to ensure that every voter who is legally eligible can have their voice heard in this election.”
Pennsylvania Department of State spokesman Matt Heckel said the lawsuit was “nothing more than an attempt to confuse and frighten people ahead of an important election” and represented “a continuation of the baseless lawsuits filed in 2020 were filed in state and federal court in an effort to cause confusion and ultimately to throw out the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians and overturn the results of that legitimate election.”
“Those attempts failed then, and these latest dishonest attempts will fail too,” he added.
Heckel pointed out that the suit was filed two weeks after Pennsylvania counties began mailing ballots to military and overseas voters “baselessly challenging Pennsylvania law, which provides clear procedures for processing applications from overseas voters .” He added that “ballots cast by ineligible voters occur in extremely low numbers and are routinely investigated and prosecuted by appropriate authorities when they occur.”
The lawsuits come as former President Donald Trump and his allies began to cast doubt on voting abroad. Last month, Trump claimed on Truth Social that Democrats would use foreign voting laws to “cheat,” a baseless theory that Elon Musk also shared on X last week.
Republicans have already filed a mountain of lawsuits ahead of the November election, especially in battleground states, which many Democrats and nonpartisan voting experts say are part of a broader strategy to sow doubt about the election results if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“None of these states did anything wrong. And this is not a new law or a new process. UOCAVA has been around for more than 40 years,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Rather, Diaz argued, the lawsuits mark “yet another attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process by scapegoating an entire group of people and falsely claiming that they are not qualified voters or that their votes are invalid and are not allowed to vote. counted.”
Diaz said federal law, as well as state law in these three states, exempts some voters — including those serving overseas in the military — from absentee voter identification requirements.
He explained that UOCAVA guarantees access to ballots to Americans living abroad — “including military personnel, active-duty military personnel, their families, members of the diplomatic corps, and just many Americans living abroad” — and that the law specifically allows such voters “to vote in their last state of residence, in the domestic U.S.”
Overseas military voters have long believed they would skew Republican. But Diaz and other experts suggested that the group has gradually transformed and is now more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats — and cited that change as a possible reason why Republicans might now want to challenge the voting bloc’s eligibility more broadly.
“Traditionally, we think of foreign voters as military voters who could skew Republicans. There are enough non-military voters who lean Democratic that the partisan mix of foreign voters could have changed,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and an election law analyst at NBC News.
But another likely motivation for the lawsuits, Hasen said, is that there are “claims that the election is not secure, which reinforce the themes of fraud that Trump has long parroted.”
Hasen added that the lawsuits amounted in part to publicity efforts, but that they could also be “placeholder lawsuits” that the Republican party will use to stake a claim on an issue and later challenge groups of ballots in very tight elections, while she argues that she raised the issue ahead of the contest.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
