GOP’s Latest Voter Suppression Target: Overseas Americans
For decades, federal law has guaranteed that U.S. citizens living abroad could cast ballots in federal elections.
Republicans historically championed overseas votes, particularly those from active-duty military members. But as civilian voter participation abroad has risen and become a greater part of the overseas vote share, the GOP has changed its tune, launching a multi-pronged effort to suppress overseas votes, which it has framed as suspicious and potentially fraudulent.
Recent legal battles in Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina — where disenfranchising overseas voters was central to the failed Republican bid to steal a Supreme Court seat — underscore a growing trend by the GOP to disqualify ballots cast in state elections by longtime eligible citizens born and living overseas. Voting rights advocates and Democrats say these attacks are part of a broader partisan strategy, driven by shifting demographics and political patterns in the overseas electorate.
“The GOP is really trying to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to vote when they’re living abroad,” Martha McDevitt-Pugh, International Chair of Democrats Abroad, told Democracy Docket. “They’re actively trying to rip away the right to vote from American citizens.”
Over 4 million U.S. citizens are eligible to vote through the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), signed by former President Ronald Reagan. But voter turnout from overseas U.S. citizens overall remains low at less than 10% of those eligible.
According to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in 2010 military members and their families cast about 51% of overseas ballots and civilians 40%. By 2020, civilian voters surpassed military voters, making up about 57% of UOCAVA voters.
Republicans have taken notice of this shift.
In the 2020 election, when President Donald Trump rallied against mail-in voting, he and his allies seldom attacked overseas voters.
“That’s when everyone thought overseas meant military,” Trump-aligned lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has helped lead the GOP effort to disenfranchise overseas voters said, as reported by the Washington Post. “Not true.”
Mitchell has been instrumental in amplifying conspiracies on overseas voting, portraying laws that protect overseas voters as a “loophole” for noncitizen voting. Through various memos and campaigns, she has framed this legally enfranchised group as a threat to election integrity — despite their U.S. citizenship and negligible impact on overall turn out.
By 2024, Trump and the GOP shifted their tone, falsely claiming Democrats were exploiting UOCAVA to “flood the system” with illegal votes and that tax payer funds were being used to facilitate voting for citizens abroad in favor of Democrats.
“Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform in September. “They are going to use UOCAVA to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever.”
Trump’s comments marked a turning point in how overseas ballots became the target of GOP suspicion and conspiracy theories.
“Until 2024, all overseas voting was a bipartisan-supported issue and then there was a false accusation that there were non-citizens voting from abroad,” Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president of U.S. Vote Foundation, told Democracy Docket. “There’s an unfounded animosity and suspicion of voting from abroad. There’s no supporting evidence of fraud or malfeasance by these voters.”
In battleground states, GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation and litigation that would make voting much harder for overseas citizens more broadly.
In Pennsylvania, GOP congressmen filed a lawsuit in September claiming the state’s procedures for verifying overseas voters’ eligibility were too lax. In GOP-controlled states, like Indiana, lawmakers added additional ID requirements for overseas to request absentee ballots and in Ohio, they reduced the deadline extension overseas voters were previously afforded for their ballots to be counted, from 10 to four days.
In North Carolina, a bill approved by the House Elections Law Committee in June would impose new requirements for both military personnel and overseas civilians to either provide a photo ID or sign a sworn affidavit explaining why they can’t provide it.
That came after losing GOP Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin tried to toss more than 60,000 absentee ballots, including about 266 cast by “never-resident” voters — those born and raised abroad who inherit U.S. citizenship and voting rights through a parent and claim a parent’s last residence as their voting address, a practice long accepted under UOCAVA and state-level expansions. A judge dismissed the case and Griffin conceded shortly after.
In Michigan, the Republican National Committee (RNC) similarly sued to block absentee ballots from U.S. citizens who have never permanently lived in the U.S. A Michigan judge threw out the lawsuit ruling it was consistent with federal and state law.
And in Arizona, the state GOP and RNC filed a lawsuit to block a law that allows never-residents to vote in the state’s elections, claiming it violates the state constitution. The lawsuit notes that only 18% of Maricopa County’s overseas voters are Republicans, while 51% are Democrats.
The RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
About 38 states currently allow voting rights to be passed on to children born to U.S. citizens living abroad. But some influential states, like Texas and Florida, do not.
Republican lawsuits and rhetoric often cast these voters as outsiders with no real ties to the community they vote in and as having no place influencing or “diluting” American elections.
“They are American citizens, subject to U.S. tax, who want to vote,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat, who has U.S. children born and living abroad, added. ”They do have a connection to their state and care about their country.”
Voting advocates warn that never-residents, who are few in number, geographically dispersed and politically unprotected, could be used as a testing ground for more sweeping disenfranchisement efforts — especially at a time when the Trump administration is trying to redefine citizenship. The notion that never-residents are a threat to election integrity, experts say, could lay the groundwork for broader challenges to voting rights under the guise of enforcing residency laws or verifying identity.
“They may come first for never-resident folks, but this is just part of the broader effort to undermine democracy,” McDevitt-Pugh said. “They chip away at who’s allowed to vote or just make it harder and more confusing so voters give up.”
Voting experts also express that civilians abroad face significantly more logistical and structural hurdles than military voters. They’re often required to print, scan, and upload documents like photo ID or affidavits with limited infrastructure. In some countries, mail systems are unreliable or prohibitively expensive. In others, firewalls or internet censorship make it difficult to access U.S. election websites at all.
“Sometimes states or local election offices block their websites for anyone coming in from abroad,” McDevitt-Pugh said. “That might be the only site you can use to download a ballot, and we’ve had to step in to get those barriers removed.”
The Trump administration is working to further erode overseas voting rights. Both Trump’s anti-voting executive order and the SAVE Act, which Republicans continue to push, would impose strict citizenship documentation requirements and ban the counting of ballots received after Election Day — provisions that directly contradict UOCAVA’s long-standing protections.
The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), part of the Department of Defense and responsible for assisting citizens abroad vote, declined to comment on specific litigation or legislation, but commented on its ongoing role in UOCAVA compliance.
“FVAP provides UOCAVA implementation guidance to state and local election officials through meetings and trainings,” a DOD spokesperson told Democracy Docket. “The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Voting Section is the enforcement body for UOCAVA.”
But that may not be reassuring. The DOJ’s Voting section has shifted under Trump from protecting voting rights to actively undermining them. It’s currently led by a former attorney for the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has a long record of working to press election officials to remove registered voters from the rolls.