GOP congressmen trying to compel Pa. to perform more checks of military, overseas ballots

Six Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania are suing the commonwealth’s secretary of state for, they claim, not adequately vetting the identities of overseas and military voters.

The lawsuit filed this week takes issue with Pennsylvania's practice of exempting certain citizens abroad from voter identification requirements, a policy the plaintiffs say opens a door to election fraud. To solve this alleged problem, they want to compel Pennsylvania to segregate ballots cast by these voters and refrain from counting them until officials perform additional voter eligibility checks.

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Reps. Guy Reschenthaler, Dan Meuser, Glenn "GT" Thompson, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly and Scott Perry are taking the commonwealth to court in collaboration with the group PA Fair Elections, an election denial organization that has also been pushing questionable data on counties to get them to purge names from their voter rolls.

The group is led by Heather Honey, a Lebanon County resident whose assertions have been echoed by former President Donald Trump when contesting Pennsylvania’s 2020 election outcome, Spotlight PA has reported.

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The state department characterizes the lawsuit as a “dishonest” effort to disenfranchise voters, many of whom are in military service and are “putting their lives on the line to defend our freedoms.”

“(D)espite the sacrifices they make to protect us, some elected leaders are now making bad-faith arguments to prevent these votes from being counted,” state department officials said in a statement.

Counties have already begun mailing ballots to military and overseas voters, the statement continued, adding the new lawsuit seems like a continuation of the “unfounded litigation” challenging the results of the 2020 election.

The legal challenge pertains to Pennsylvanians covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which can apply to military personnel and their spouses, study-abroad students or other people who live abroad.

Generally, voters in the commonwealth must provide proof of identification every time they request an absentee ballot. Military and overseas voters, however, are exempt from this requirement, according to the state department.

These Pennsylvanians can register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot simultaneously by filling out a brief application that asks for their driver license number or their Social Security number. If they don’t have a license or a Social Security number, they’re supposed to state that on the form, but it will not necessarily result in the rejection of their ballot application.

The GOP congressmen object that this policy violates minimum standards set by federal law and “makes Pennsylvania’s elections vulnerable to ineligible votes” by allowing people to register to vote and cast a ballot without providing identification. In particular, they claim foreign nations “could easily submit” falsified voting forms in attempts to meddle with American elections.

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Election officials in the Keystone State have already mailed out more than 25,000 ballots to overseas and military voters, according to the complaint.

Honey and the PA Fair Elections in 2023 filed a similar complaint, which is on appeal and still pending in the Commonwealth Court after the Governor’s Office of General Counsel found the state department did not violate federal law.

In that challenge, the state department argued that federal law leaves voter registration requirements up to the states and noted rules vary widely across the nation. Department officials said in the prepared statement that in Pennsylvania, people face criminal consequences, including imprisonment and fines, if they lie when registering to vote.

“Ballots cast by ineligible voters occur at extremely low rates and are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities when they occur,” the department added.

Bethany Rodgers is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania capital bureau investigative journalist.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: GOP congressmen sue PA officials over military, overseas ballots