An overseas ballot process that has long been seen as sacrosanct by both parties, due to its connection to US military members serving in foreign countries, is the target of multiple GOP-backed lawsuits filed in recent days.
The new legal assault comes as ballots cast by Americans abroad have become very favorable for Democrats and could be crucial in getting Vice President Kamala Harris over the finish line.
In addition to the new lawsuits filed by Republicans in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan, former President Donald Trump has suggested without evidence that the overseas vote is a source of fraud, even as he has made entreaties to Americans abroad with a campaign promise of lowering their taxes.
There are about 6.5 million eligible American voters living, serving and studying overseas, with about 1.6 million of them in battleground states, and more in tight House districts. Those votes could be decisive: The 2020 election was decided by 44,000 votes over four states.
More than 1.2 million ballots were sent abroad in 2020 and nearly 890,000 were eventually counted, according to a report by the US Election Assistance Commission.
Democrats have painted new GOP legal challenges as an attack on the franchise of service people who are putting their lives on the line for the country by serving abroad, though the civilian expat community is more centrally in the crosshairs of the Republican lawsuits. Election officials also say that last-minute changes to election procedures with ballots already sent out would not only disenfranchise voters but lay the groundwork to falsely cast doubt on the results.
Lawyers for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, accused Republicans in a court filing of seeking “to harass the Secretary and sow doubt about the integrity of the election.”
In Pennsylvania, GOP congressmen are asking the court to set aside all ballots cast from overseas, including those from military voters, for further verification. The Republican National Committee, which is behind the lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina, made similar requests for certain overseas ballots in those states to be segregated, foreshadowing the possibility for post-election fights to get those ballots tossed if the margins are tight.
The Republicans will have to overcome several procedural issues that have been raised about their cases. But any court order setting overseas ballots aside to be counted later, after the disputes are resolved, risks giving Trump the appearance of a lead on Election Night that would likely be diminished once those ballots were added into the results. Key to Trump’s strategy in his efforts to overturn the election in 2020 was to argue that ballot-counting should stop after Election Day, before election officials had finished processing the Democratic-heavy mail-in vote.
GOP officials say that they’re trying to obtain clarity from courts about what they’ve described as legal conflict in how those states are handling those ballots, as it’s not entirely clear how many ballots would be tossed if they were to prevail in their cases.
“Regardless of the number impacted…we want every single legal vote to be counted properly, and counting illegitimate votes dilutes that and cancels it,” one RNC official told CNN.
A hearing in the Michigan case is scheduled in Detroit on Thursday, while a federal judge will hear arguments on the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Friday in Harrisburg. A hearing in the North Carolina lawsuit is scheduled for next week.