(Bloomberg) -- Republicans lost three recent lawsuits challenging how battleground states are handling voting for US citizens living overseas, with one Michigan judge slamming the “11th-hour attempt to disenfranchise” Americans ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Courts dismissed or denied emergency action in cases filed in Michigan and North Carolina by the Republican National Committee and in Pennsylvania by GOP members of Congress. The three states are expected to be critical in the race for the White House between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Taken together, the rulings show US judges are wary of lawsuits asking them to intervene in the final weeks of the campaign. The cases were filed between Sept. 30 and Oct. 8.
The RNC swiftly appealed after losing the first round in both of its cases. But a Michigan court denied its request to put the case on a fast track and, on Tuesday, a North Carolina appellate panel rebuffed the party’s request for immediate action.
“We are fighting to protect every legal vote, including from military and overseas citizens, to not be canceled by ineligible votes,” RNC spokesperson Claire Zunk said.
A judge dismissed the Pennsylvania legislators’ case on Tuesday. Their attorney Karen DiSalvo said in a statement that they’re “considering all options for appeal.”
“All Pennsylvanians deserve fair and lawful elections and lawful votes should not be diluted by ballots cast by ineligible individuals,” DiSalvo said.
The Democratic National Committee, which joined the three cases to back the states being sued, praised the decisions. DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd said in a statement that the lawsuits were “nothing more than a transparent ploy to threaten the voting rights of military families and try to sow chaos in this election for cynical political ends.”
Military Posted Abroad
The cases concern the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, a federal law passed in 1986 that created special absentee voting rules for US military members stationed abroad and other Americans living overseas. Although every state is required to incorporate the law into its election processes, they have discretion about how to do it.
The RNC alleged that election officials in Michigan and North Carolina were wrongly allowing Americans living abroad to register to vote in those states even if they’d never lived there. Judges concluded that lawmakers in both states had created residency carve-outs for US citizen children born overseas or certain relatives of former residents, as long as they weren’t registered to vote in another state.
Wake County Superior Court Judge John Smith wrote that North Carolina’s law had been in effect since at least 2011 and hadn’t been challenged before. Beyond the timing issue, Smith found that the lawsuit featured “unsupported and speculative allegations for which there is not even a scintilla of substantive evidence.”
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Sima Patel said that the RNC sued 17 days after the deadline for absentee ballots to be sent to overseas voters, so siding with the party would require state officials to spend the final days before the election searching for returned ballots cast under the residency exception.
“It is hard to imagine a more prejudicial situation arising from plaintiffs’ delay,” she wrote.
Last-Minute Filings
The Pennsylvania Republicans claimed that the state’s law governing overseas voting violated what federal law required applicants to provide to prove their eligibility to cast a ballot. The state said that the delegation was confused about what the federal laws said.
In a decision Tuesday, US District Judge Christopher Conner found that the legislators’ case failed for several reasons, but chiefly because of their delay in filing it. The state law was passed in 2012 and officials issued the latest guidance about how to implement it in 2022 and 2023.
The challengers “provide no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit,” Conner wrote.
And the relief that the legislators had asked for — requiring the state to segregate ballots from overseas voters and complete a new verification process — was a “nonstarter,” he said.
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