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 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.
That law, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), requires that states allow eligible Americans who live overseas to vote in federal elections. Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina are among a group of states that do not require such voters to provide identification to be sent a ballot.
“North Carolinians and Michiganders should not have their votes canceled by those who’ve never lived in the state in the first place — plain and simple. This is illegal and we will stop it,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement earlier this week announcing the suits in those two states.
Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for North Carolina’s bipartisan State Board of Elections, said that the state’s approach on overseas voting has been law for 13 years and that without it, North Carolinians living abroad would not be able to vote in federal elections.
“The plaintiffs have challenged a state law that allows U.S. citizens living abroad to vote in North Carolina elections when these voters’ only residential connection to a U.S. state is through their parents’ former residence in North Carolina,” Gannon said. “Otherwise, these U.S. citizens have no other way to vote in U.S. elections. North Carolina lawmakers adopted this law more than 13 years ago, as a way to implement a federal law that required states to make voting more accessible for 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 the rules for voter eligibility is well before an 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 suit “is not a legitimate legal concern” but rather is, “just the latest in the RNC’s PR campaign to spread unfounded distrust in the integrity of our elections.”
“It’s disappointing to see a national political party try to disenfranchise our military families but at this point, unfortunately, it’s not surprising,” she added. “We will continue our work to ensure that every voter eligible under the law can make their voices heard in this election.”
Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson Matt Heckel said the suit was “nothing more than an attempt to confuse and frighten people ahead of an important election” and represented “a continuation of the unfounded litigation in state and federal court filed in 2020 in an effort to sow confusion and ultimately to throw out the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians and overturn the results of that legitimate election.”
“Those efforts failed then, and these latest dishonest efforts will also fail,” he added.
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.”
Diaz said that federal law, as well as state law in these three states, exempts some voters — including those serving in the military overseas — from identification requirements for absentee voters.
He explained that UOCAVA guarantees ballot access to Americans living abroad — “including military, active duty military, their families, members of the diplomatic corps, and just many Americans who live overseas” — 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 thought to skew Republican. But Diaz and other experts suggested that the group has gradually transformed to be more evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — and offered that change as a potential reason as to why Republicans would now want to challenge the voting bloc’s eligibility more broadly.
“Traditionally, we think of overseas voters as military voters who might skew Republican. There are enough nonmilitary voters tending Democratic that the partisan mix of overseas voters might have changed,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and an NBC News election law analyst.
But another likely motivation for the lawsuits, Hasen said, is that it “let’s there be claims that the election is not secure that kind of bolster the themes of fraud that Trump has been parroting for a long time.”
Hasen added that the lawsuits amounted partly to a publicity effort, but that they may also be “placeholder lawsuits” which the GOP will use to stake a claim on an issue and later challenge groups of ballots in a very close election, while arguing they raised the issue ahead of the contest.
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