A half-dozen Pennsylvania Congressional representatives have filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the way Pennsylvania handles ballots cast overseas. And although the policies they seek to overturn have been public for years, they are doing so just weeks before Election Day itself — prompting attorneys for the state to accuse them of a “judicial fire drill” that could “inject chaos into an election process that is well underway.”
The legislators, who include Western Pennsylvania U.S. Rep.s Guy Reschenthaler and Mike Kelly, filed the suit earlier this month, after some 25,000 ballots had already been sent to civilian and military voters overseas. The suit contends that Pennsylvania election officials instruct county election workers not to verify the identity or voting eligibility of those overseas voters — which it argues is a violation of federal law. It asks the court to preclude the state from counting such ballots until county officials are instructed to verify their legitimacy.
By not doing more to address the possibility of a fraudulent ballot from being cast, Reschenthaler said in a statement, “The Pennsylvania Department of State is unlawfully diluting the rightful ballots of the brave men and women who serve our nation and their family members.” And as a veteran himself — Reschenthaler served as a Navy lawyer — he said he would “always stand up for those in uniform who deserve to have their right to a secure election protected."
The federal law in question, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act, eases some verification requirements for Americans overseas, given the logistical challenges such procedures would face. But a statement announcing the lawsuit declares, “These privileges, intended to make voting easier, also create additional security vulnerabilities” to fraud, and states should step up their efforts to verify that the people applying for overseas ballots are eligible.
Unlike many other states, Pennsylvania does not require voters who apply to vote by mail from overseas to provide identification, like passport photos.
The lawsuit does not identify any cases where a fraudulent overseas ballot has actually been cast. The plaintiffs note that in 2020, Iran had hacked some voter information from a database in Alaska which could allow them to file false applications from overseas — an incident they say demonstrates an awareness of the overseas-voting system, though they acknowledge that “it does not appear” that the effort was attempted.
But in a legal response, lawyers for Pennsylvania’s Department of State note that the legislators’ lawsuit is questioning a state law passed 14 years ago, and that the complaint relies on statements made by election officials in 2022. There is, the state brief argues, “no excuse” for waiting to file the suit. “Nor do they provide any reason for bringing this action at the eleventh hour — after voting in the 2024 General Election has already commenced.”
Other than forwarding the press release about the suit, Kelly and Reschenthaler’s did not respond to queries about the lawsuit. But its timing has raised suspicions about the motive behind it.
“It’s a voter-suppression attempt that is coming weeks before the election, and after ballots were sent out,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “That should tell you everything you need to know. “
While there has been intense legal scrutiny of almost every aspect of Pennsylvania’s elections since Donald Trump refused to acknowledge defeat in the 2020 election, Hesley-Robin said, “There hasn’t been much discussion about overseas and military votes in the past. And I think the reason you don’t see that happening is because fraud just doesn’t occur.””
The Washington Post, which first reported the lawsuit last week, cited the suit as part of “a long list of Republican-backed litigation around the country with just weeks to go before the Nov. 5 election” — moves that critics say were “laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the presidential vote” if Donald Trump loses it. The paper notes that while voting patterns for overseas ballots are hard to discern, the overseas vote is trending Democratic as Americans living and working abroad increasingly outnumber more conservative military servicepeople.
Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the last presidential election precipitated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. And in the wake of that attack, all six Republicans who are part of the suit voted not to certify the electoral votes of their own state for Joe Biden, despite a total lack of evidence that the vote was inaccurate.
“This is coming from six members of Congress who voted against having the votes of Pennsylvanians thrown out in 2020,” said Hensley-Robin. Like Trump’s doomed legal fight to contest the 2020 results, he added, this challenge was “highly unlikely to survive a review by any federal court. But I think it is part of a widespread effort to cast doubt on the results of the election, and to feed a bunch of conspiracies."
