Republicans Launch Major New Attack on Michigan-Based Overseas Voters

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has filed a sweeping new lawsuit in Michigan that seeks to eliminate a state law that protects voting access for U.S. citizens living abroad.

The move marks the GOP’s second attempt in Michigan — in less than two years — to invalidate the rights of overseas voters. But the new filing goes far beyond what Republicans attempted, and lost, in 2024.

The RNC’s new complaint demands that judges strike down Michigan’s law that allows U.S. citizens to inherit voting rights through their parents and lets them use their parent’s last Michigan address for voting purposes.

“Individuals who have never lived in the United States, let alone Michigan, should not have a say in Michigan’s elections,” RNC Chair Joe Gruters said following the lawsuit’s filing. “Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is ignoring the Michigan Constitution by allowing people who don’t live in Michigan to vote in Michigan. That’s why the RNC is fighting to ensure only lawful votes count.”

In last year’s lawsuit, Republicans took aim only at a single guidance document in the state’s election manual. That case was thrown out just days before the 2024 election. 

Their new challenge explicitly asks the court to force Michigan to permanently end voting access for all so-called “never-resident” overseas voters, including thousands of U.S. citizens born abroad to active-duty military parents.

Republicans are also asking for a ruling on an aggressive timeline. They want the court to decide the case well before June 20, 2026, the date Michigan must begin distributing overseas ballots for the August primary.

If the RNC wins, thousands of eligible overseas Michiganders would lose access to vote by next summer.

Also unlike last year’s suit, Republicans now openly frame their filing as a partisan weapon. They argue that overseas voting harms their candidates and gives Democrats an electoral advantage.

“Counting ballots of ineligible overseas voters who never resided in Michigan will result in an inaccurate tally of votes,” the complaint reads. “Moreover, historically overseas voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. Thus, counting the ballots of ineligible overseas voters will disproportionally harm Republican candidates.”

The RNC does not make any claim of fraud or threats to election security, as is often the case in GOP attacks on voting access. Instead, Republicans argue that their political competitiveness is harmed if overseas voters participate at all.

This latest lawsuit fits neatly into the GOP’s broader nationwide push to limit overseas voting access. 

Since 2020, Republican lawmakers, state parties and allied operatives have launched lawsuits and proposed new legislation aimed at narrowing or dismantling long-standing voting protections for overseas Americans.

And President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March which among other things would have required documentary proof of citizenship for voters and instructed states not to count mailed ballots arriving after Election Day, which would have severely impacted overseas voters. Much of that order was blocked by the courts. 

“The 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! They are going to use UOCAVA to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever. (Foreign interference?),” Trump posted during his 2024 campaign. “Remember they say, we have the ‘most secure elections in history,’ and anyone can get a ballot emailed to them!”

More recently, Cleta Mitchell — an anti-voting activist and Trump adviser who played a leading role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election — suggested that the president could target overseas and military voters by executive order.

“I think that there are some areas in which the president can issue an executive order under existing law,” she said. “One would be the overseas people who vote — deployed military and overseas citizens — the president has authority to appoint a designate to enforce that. And all of those are federal ballots.”

The RNC’s new Michigan case appears even more sweeping than its recent litigation in Arizona and North Carolina, where Republicans have tried to toss the votes of overseas U.S. citizens as well. 

It more closely mirrors the goals of the federal PROVE Act, a bill introduced this year by Republicans in Congress that aims to block Americans abroad from voting in their home states and instead force them to cast a ballot only in Washington, D.C.

This new case out of Michigan is the GOP’s latest challenge to the rights of Americans who rely on overseas voting protections that have existed for decades. And it signals that the GOP’s war on overseas voters has entered a new, more aggressive phase.