Republicans are trying to prevent military members from voting. That’s it, that’s the tweet.
Okay, to be fair, it’s not the tweet, not least because Elon Musk is busy burning Ex-Twitter to the ground and we don’t post there anymore. But Republicans, in their zeal to suppress votes, have managed to maneuver themselves into a position where they’re suing to prevent service members deployed overseas from casting ballots — a remarkable own goal for a party which has long enjoyed a statistical advantage with members of America’s armed services.
The lawsuits involve the Uniform and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, found at 52 USC Ch. 203 et seq, and known to its friends as UOCAVA. It was enacted in 1986 to make it easier for military members deployed abroad with their families to vote by allowing them to apply for absentee ballots in all 50 states with the aptly named Federal Post Card Application (FPCA).
The law was uncontroversial for decades, including the provision allowing voters to attest to citizenship by signing under penalty of perjury. But in 2020 a reported 938,297 UOCAVA voters cast their ballots, and some 60 percent of them were non-military — a number which did not escape the notice of both major political parties.
As is their wont, Democrats responded by trying to persuade more eligible citizens to vote. They rallied overseas voters in the midterms and hosted an Americans Abroad for Harris-Walz Zoom event in September. And as is their wont, Republicans tried to disenfranchise those same voters, alleging without evidence that the program was rife with fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens.
OG vote suppressor Cleta Mitchell said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the GOP only cares about UOCAVA now that it’s being used by a constituency that is less reliably Republican.
Republicans filed lawsuits in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to disenfranchise UOCAVA voters, since any batch of overseas ballots is likely to contain six Democrats for every four Republicans. All three complaints were filed within the 90 day “quiet period” under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which bars states from systemically removing lists of voters from the rolls. This virtually guarantees that they won’t get the relief they’re seeking, and yet they filed anyway.
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