Republicans have filed lawsuits over the past week in three key battleground states seeking to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by US citizens living abroad, including military personnel, alleging that some of the votes were particularly prone to fraud.
Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan polling experts have staunchly defended the previously uncontroversial overseas voting rules, saying the lawsuits are an effort to cast doubt on the accuracy of next month’s election results.
The Republican National Committee sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan last week in state courts, alleging they have illegal rules on their books that expand the right to vote abroad to people who haven’t verified residency in those states.
And a filed a lawsuit last week in federal court, a group of Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania made similar claims, arguing that absentee ballots in the state are at risk of fraud because those voters do not face the same voter ID requirements as other absentee voters.
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 alleges that Schmidt instructed local election officials in the state to allow certain US citizens to vote abroad — a group of voters who include military personnel. must be exempted from the requirements of the license.
The GOP’s claim North Carolina State Board of Electionss and Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson He argued that officials in those states, where Republicans have advocated expanding voter qualifications to people not covered by a federal law designed to protect voting rights for many Americans living abroad, have replicated similar rules.
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 the states that do not require voters to show ID to be mailed a ballot.
“North Carolinians and Michiganders should not have their votes overruled by those who have never lived in the state — plain and simple. It’s illegal and we’re going to stop it,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said earlier this week when he announced the suits in those two states.
Patrick Gannon, spokesman for North Carolina’s bipartisan State Board of Elections, said the state’s approach to overseas voting has been the law for 13 years, without which North Carolinians who live overseas cannot vote in federal elections.
“Plaintiffs challenged a state law that allows U.S. citizens living abroad to vote in North Carolina elections when those voters’ only residential connection to the U.S. state is through their parents’ former residence in North Carolina,” Gannon said. “Otherwise, these US citizens have no other way to vote in US elections. North Carolina lawmakers passed the law more than 13 years ago as a way to implement a federal law requiring states to make voting more accessible to military families and other citizens living overseas.
“This lawsuit was filed after voting had already begun for the North Carolina general election. The time to protest the rules related to voter rights is not after the votes are cast, but long before the election.”
Michigan State Department spokeswoman Angela Benander said in a statement that the lawsuit was “not a legitimate legal concern” but instead “just the latest in the RNC’s PR campaign to spread unwarranted distrust in the integrity of our elections.” “
“It’s disappointing to see a national political party trying to disenfranchise our military families, but unfortunately not surprising at this point,” he said. “We will continue our work so that every voter who has the right within the framework of the law can make his voice heard in this election.”
Matt Heckel, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said the lawsuit was “nothing more than an attempt to confuse and scare people in the run-up to an important election” and was “a continuation of frivolous litigation in state and federal court in 2020.” confusion and ultimately throw away the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians and nullify the results of this legitimate election.”
“Those efforts failed then, and these latest dishonest attempts will fail as well,” he said.
Heckel noted that the lawsuit was filed two weeks after Pennsylvania counties began sending ballots to military and overseas voters, and “is an unfounded challenge to Pennsylvania law that provides clear procedures for processing applications from overseas voters.” He added that “ballots cast by ineligible voters occur at extremely low rates and are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities when they occur.”
The lawsuits come at a time when former President Donald Trump and his allies are raising doubts about voting abroad. Trump last month he claimed Elon Musk on Truth Social that Democrats will use overseas voting laws to “cheat” is also an unfounded theory. Shared on X last week.
Republicans have already applied mountain of quarrel Ahead of the November elections, mostly in battleground states, many Democrats and nonpartisan polling experts say it’s part of a broader strategy to cast doubt on the outcome of the election should Trump lose to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“None of these states have done 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 for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Rather, Diaz argued, the lawsuits are “another attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process by scapegoating an entire group of people and claiming that they are not qualified voters or that their votes are invalid and should not be. is considered.”
Federal law, as well as state laws in those three states, exempt some voters, including those serving in the military overseas, from identification requirements for absentee voters, Diaz said.
He explained that UOCAVA gives ballot access to Americans living abroad, including “the military, active-duty military personnel, their families, members of the diplomatic corps, and many Americans living abroad,” and that the law allows such voters “to vote gives special permission”. their last state of residence, domestic in the United States”
Military voters abroad have long thought to sway Republicans. But Diaz and other experts have suggested that the group is gradually becoming a more even split between Republicans and Democrats — and suggested that shift as a potential reason why Republicans now want to more broadly challenge the eligibility of the voting bloc.
“Traditionally, we think of overseas voters as military voters who can skew Republican. There are enough non-military voters leaning Democratic that the partisan makeup of the overseas electorate may have changed,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School and an election law analyst for NBC News.
But another possible motivation for the allegations, Hasen said, “may be claims that the upcoming election is unsafe to reinforce themes of fraud that Trump has long parroted.”
Hasen added that the claims are partly propaganda, but they could also be “placeholder claims” that the GOP will use to make a case on an issue and then challenge voting groups in very close elections. issue on the eve of the competition.