In Pennsylvania, the ballots of over 4,000 out-of-state voters were challenged | US elections 2024

Mariam Larson lives in the Canadian province of British Columbia, but has been voting by mail in Pennsylvania for decades.

This year, as is usual in federal elections, she requested a postal ballot and returned it at the end of October.

Last Friday, she said she was stunned when she received a notice from her local elections board that her ballot was being challenged by a name she didn't recognize. The challenge said she lived outside the country, was not a member of the military and therefore was not registered to vote in Pennsylvania and could not cast a ballot. She could call or write to the elections office in Lycoming County in north-central Pennsylvania or appear at a hearing on Nov. 8.

According to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as reports from news outlets Votebeat and LancasterOnline, Larson is one of more than 4,000 out-of-state voters whose ballots were challenged in 14 counties in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state.

“I was confused and trying to understand what the argument was about,” Larson said in an interview Sunday night. “Then I looked into it more and tried to understand it and I kind of got scared and then I got angry.

“There was a fear factor, there was some sort of implicit threat that I had done something wrong,” she said.

Pennsylvania law requires someone to be a resident of the state to vote. But the challenges are not valid, the ACLU says, because federal law allows U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections in the place in the U.S. where they last lived if they live abroad and are unsure whether they will return to the USA. The ACLU said the challenges appear to be a mass effort through a form letter process.

In 2020, 26,952 out-of-state Pennsylvania voters successfully returned their counted ballots.

“The proper course of action for any county that receives mass lawsuits against these federally qualified 'overseas voters' is to summarily dismiss the lawsuits as both procedurally and substantively deficient,” ACLU lawyers wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state . “Counties should formally dismiss or deny appeals as quickly as possible to minimize delays or disruptions to the canvassing process,” ACLU lawyers wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state.

So far, officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Center and Lycoming counties have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman.

The person who submitted Larsons' The challenge was Karen DiSalvo, an attorney with a group called the Election Research Institute. DiSalvo recently lost a federal lawsuit challenging foreign voter eligibility that a federal judge said was based on “fantastic fears of foreign wrongdoing.” The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a prominent activist who has spread false claims about elections.

Judges have dismissed similar challenges to out-of-state voters in North Carolina and Michigan.

In Pennsylvania, voters can challenge other voters' absentee ballots. It's not clear how Pennsylvania counties will deal with the challenges. Even if they are rebuffed, they underscore that Donald Trump and his allies are already sowing doubt about the election. The former president falsely claimed in September that the votes of foreign voters were fraudulent.

Recent polls show Pennsylvania essentially undecided and its 19 electoral votes are hotly contested in both campaigns. Because the race is so close, both campaigns are fighting bitterly over rules that could affect whether certain mail-in votes count.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that voters who forget to write the date on their ballots will not be counted. Both the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court also recently ruled that voters who forget to put their ballot in a protective secrecy sleeve can cast a provisional vote on Election Day.

In both cases, Republicans tried to block the vote count because of technical deficiencies.

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