Republicans have filed lawsuits over the past week in three pivotal battleground states seeking to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including military members, arguing that some votes are particularly prone to fraud.
Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan voting experts strongly defended the previously uncontroversial overseas voting rules, arguing that the suits amounted to efforts to further lay the groundwork to question the veracity of the election results next month.
The Republican National Committee last week sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan in state courts, alleging they had on their books unlawful rules that extended overseas voting eligibility to people whose residency in those states had not been verified.
And in a suit filed in a federal court last week, a group of Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania made similar allegations, arguing that overseas ballots in the state are at risk of fraud because those voters do not face the same voter ID requirements that other absentee 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 guidance to local election officials in the state allowing some U.S. citizens voting overseas — a group that includes military personnel — to be exempted from voter ID requirements.
The GOP’s suits against the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson alleged that the officials in those states had iterated similar rules, which Republicans argued extended voter qualifications to people not covered by the federal law designed to protect the right to vote for many Americans living overseas. …
Heckel pointed out that the suit was filed two weeks after counties Pennsylvania began mailing ballots to military and overseas voters “and baselessly challenges Pennsylvania law, which provides clear procedures for processing applications by 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 as former President Donald Trump and his allies have begun to sow doubts about overseas voting. Last month, Trump claimed on Truth Social that Democrats would use overseas voting laws to “cheat,” a baseless theory Elon Musk also shared on X last week.
Republicans have already filed a mountain of litigation ahead of the November election, mostly in battleground states, that many Democrats and nonpartisan voting experts say is part of a broader strategy to create doubts about the election results if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“None of these states have done anything wrong. And this is not a new law or new process. UOCAVA has been around for more than 40 years,” said Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Rather, Diaz argued, the suits “mark yet another effort to create doubt in 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 shouldn’t be counted.”