Miriam Larson lives in the Canadian province of British Columbia, but has been voting by mail in Pennsylvania for decades.
This year, as she typically does in federal elections, she requested an absentee ballot and returned it in late October.
Last Friday, she said she was stunned when she received a notice from her local board of elections telling her her ballot had been challenged by a name she didn’t recognize. She was living overseas, not a member of the military, and therefore was not registered to vote in Pennsylvania and could not cast a ballot, the challenge said. She can call or write to the elections office in Licking County in north-central Pennsylvania or appear at a hearing on Nov. 8.
Larson is one of more than 4,000 overseas voters whose ballots were challenged in 14 counties in Pennsylvania, a key Pennsylvania state, according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as well as reports from news outlets Votebeat and LancasterOnline. .
“I was confused, and I tried to understand the reason for the disagreement,” Larson said in an interview Sunday evening. “Then I looked into it more, trying to understand it, and I got kind of scared, and then I got angry.
“There was a fear factor, there was some kind of implicit threat that I had done something wrong,” she said.
Pennsylvania law requires that a person be a resident of the state in order to vote. But the challenges are invalid, the ACLU says, because federal law allows American citizens to vote in federal elections in the last place they lived in the United States if they live abroad and are unsure whether they will return to the United States. The ACLU said the challenges appear to be a team effort accomplished through mail merge.
In 2020, 26,952 Pennsylvania overseas voters successfully returned counted ballots.
“The appropriate course of action for any county receiving mass appeals of these federally qualified ‘outside electors’ is to summarily dismiss the appeals as procedurally and substantively deficient,” ACLU lawyers wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state. “Counties should dismiss or formally deny appeals as quickly as possible to minimize any delay or disruption to the vote counting process,” ACLU lawyers wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state.
Officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Center and Licking have faced challenges so far, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman.
The person who brought the Larsons challenge is Karen DeSalvo, an attorney with a group called the Election Research Institute. DiSalvo recently lost a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of overseas voters, which a federal judge said was based on “delusional fears of foreign wrongdoing.” The Election Research Institute is headed by Heather Honey, a prominent activist who has spread false claims about the election.
The justices rejected similar challenges to foreign electors in North Carolina and Michigan.
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Pennsylvania allows voters to challenge other voters’ mail-in ballots. It’s not clear how Pennsylvania counties will handle the challenges. Even if they are impeached, they underscore how Donald Trump and his allies are already sowing seeds of doubt about the election. The former president falsely suggested in September that votes from overseas voters were fraudulent.
Recent polls show Pennsylvania to be essentially tied, and with both campaigns hotly contesting its 19 electoral votes. Since the race is so close, both campaigns are fighting fiercely over rules that could affect whether some mail-in votes will count.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that voters who forgot to write the date on their ballots will not have their votes counted. The state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court also recently ruled that voters who forget to place their ballots in a protective secret sleeve can temporarily cast their ballots on Election Day.
In both cases, Republicans sought to block the vote count due to technical flaws.
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