The GOP’s Lawsuit Against Overseas and Military Voters Failed, But Why Is It Even a Thing?
Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Election season can have familiar beats: lawn signs, the exact same political attack ad airing every time you watch a show, the “I Voted” sticker you get after finally submitting your ballot. But printing out a ballot in a London post office, then realizing half the ballot was cut off, then scrambling to find a friend who can print it out for you does not follow typical U.S. voting traditions. But this is the plight – well, my plight – of an overseas voter. There are nearly 3 million of us American citizens living abroad who are eligible to vote, along with about 1.4 million U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of their spouses, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP).
This year, these voters have already become the targets of Republican election challenges.
On Tuesday, a U.S. District Court judge threw out a suit led by six Republican House members who argued that Pennsylvania election administrators had directed local election officials to exempt military and overseas voters from verification requirements. These Congressmen, along with PA Fair Elections, a right-wing group that has spread election misinformation, alleged that ineligible voters – including potentially bad foreign actors – could cast ballots, and they sought to segregate all overseas and absentee ballots until voters’ identities could be verified.
Pennsylvania’s top election officials pushed back, saying the rules around overseas and military voters had been in place for years, and the state had issued updated guidance in 2022 and 2023. By now, Pennsylvania had already started mailing out thousands of absentee ballots, and rule changes at this late stage could confuse and potentially disenfranchise voters. The judge agreed, saying these House Republicans (who’d also run and won federal office while these same rules were in place) had failed to “fully flesh out” how it would even be possible to segregate overseas and military ballots. The judge also called the plaintiff’s allegation of a tainted voter pool “wholly speculative.”
“An injunction at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters, to say nothing of the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures on top of their current duties,” Judge Christopher C. Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his opinion.
This Pennsylvania case was one of three pre-election lawsuits targeting military and overseas voters – better known as UOCAVA voters, for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986, which established the federal rules for these voters, though states have discretion in how they manage their elections. The Republican National Committee also filed lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina that challenged the registration of U.S. citizens overseas who’d never lived in the state. Both Michigan and North Carolina – along with quite a lot of other red, blue, and purple-y states – allow Americans who have lived abroad and have a parent or legal guardian who last lived in that state to also register there. Both of those cases were dismissed, and the courts denied the RNC’s attempt to expedite the appeal. A Michigan judge called it an “11th-hour attempt to disenfranchise voters.” A lawyer for the Republicans in the Pennsylvania case said Tuesday that they’re “considering all options for appeal.”
The lawsuits have failed on the legal merits so far, but they may succeed in more insidious ways by muddying up the legitimacy of these overseas votes among those already primed to distrust the electoral system – specifically, Donald Trump and his supporters and allies who are reusing and refining their 2020 election denialism playbook. In 2024, Trump and his campaign softened their stance against mail-in and early voting, an apparent recognition that convincing Republicans it was full of fraud was actually leaving votes on the table.
But UOCAVA votes have been the exception to this, and Trump has accused Democrats of “getting ready to CHEAT!”
“They are going to use UOCAVA to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity whatsoever,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in September. Trump allies are both boosting and bringing coherency to his rants.