The lawsuits have targeted North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania, challenging the ballots of overseas voters.
In Pennsylvania, six Republican lawmakers from the state who did not vote to certify President Biden’s 2020 election filed a lawsuit last week against the state.
The GOP lawmakers took issue with state laws that do not require voter identification or eligibility and asked to stop the ballot counting until identities are verified.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) filed in North Carolina and Michigan, accusing the states of allowing overseas voters who have never lived there to vote.
“This is illegal and we will stop it,” said RNC Chairman Michael Whatley in a statement.
The lawsuits are testing the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which allows for U.S. citizens living abroad, including members of the military, to vote.
Democrats slammed the GOP for the lawsuits. In a Monday statement, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) said the effort in Pennsylvania was “disgraceful and anti-democratic.”
“This isn’t about Democrats and Republicans,” Ryan said. “It’s about doing right by those putting their lives on the line for our country, and they deserve to know immediately their right to vote will be protected.”
Ryan joined five other Democrats, including two from Pennsylvania, in writing a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, asking him to clarify how he would protect servicemembers’ right to vote.
- The Defense Department told The Hill that it “will respond to Congress, as appropriate, as we always do.”
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“The Secretary believes that service members serving overseas, eligible family members and U.S. citizens overseas have the right to vote, and DOD will continue to work to help them do so,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
There is somewhere around 200,000 American servicemembers stationed overseas, while other U.S. citizens living abroad or working for the government, including at embassies, are also eligible to vote.
Other military servicemembers and their families who are registered to vote in one state but have been deployed to a base in another state are also swept up in overseas balloting forms.
The concerns come after Republicans in the 2020 election accused Democrats of using mail-in and absentee voting as a vehicle for election fraud.
- Former President Trump himself waded into the overseas voting fight when he said last month that Democrats were working to “get millions of votes from Americans living overseas.”
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“Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!” he posted on Truth Social.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), who joined the letter to Austin, said in a statement this week she was “deeply ashamed of my colleagues who are trying to prevent members of our military” from voting.
She said the GOP must not be able “to toss aside those rights and disenfranchise the very people who are serving us and are in harm’s way across the globe.”
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
