Judge tosses GOP congressmen’s challenge to ballots of Pennsylvanians living overseas
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner said the challenge relied on “phantom fears of foreign malfeasance” to raise merely speculative claims that bad actors could exploit state policies.
A federal judge tossed a lawsuit from six Pennsylvania Republican congressmen on Tuesday, saying that their efforts to challenge the validity of thousands of ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad had come too late and that they had no standing to sue.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner said the challenge — filed last month by U.S. Reps. Scott Perry, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Mike Kelly, Lloyd Smucker, and Guy Reschenthaler — relied on “phantom fears of foreign malfeasance” to raise merely speculative claims that bad actors could take advantage of state policies to cast illegal votes.
What’s more, the judge said in a 21-page opinion, granting the congressmen the relief they sought — the segregation of all ballots submitted by Pennsylvanians living abroad — was too drastic and too disruptive a remedy to implement this close to the election.
“An injunction at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters, to say nothing of the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures on top of their current duties,” Conner wrote.
His dismissal of the case follows similar orders from federal judges in Michigan and North Carolina, where activists had filed similar suits challenging state practices for verifying the validity of ballots from voters living abroad.
In the Pennsylvania case, the congressmen contended that because local elections officials are not required to verify the identity or eligibility of voters who register overseas, those ballots are more vulnerable to fraud.
They had asked the court to order the segregation of all overseas ballots cast in the 2024 election, meaning those votes would not be included in the state’s overall vote tally until the eligibility of the voters who submitted them could be further vetted.
The lawsuit drew immediate criticism from election-law experts and military voters, who panned it as a preemptive voter suppression play. State election officials maintained Pennsylvania’s policies were in compliance with state and federal law.
In his ruling Tuesday, Conner — an appointee of George W. Bush who presides over a Harrisburg-based court — said that current procedures in Pennsylvania had been in place for years and that by waiting until less than five weeks before the election to challenge them, the congressmen had committed an “inexcusable delay.”
What’s more, the judge said, they had failed to provide anything more than speculation to suggest Pennsylvania’s policies were being exploited to cast illegal votes.
The lawmakers’ suit mirrored a similar challenge that has been pending before the state’s Commonwealth Court since last year. That case was brought by Heather Honey, a self-fashioned “election integrity” investigator whose disproved research as head of a local organization called PA Fair Elections has been frequently promoted by the far right.
Her group was also a plaintiff in the congressmen’s case and Conner on Tuesday accused them of using the federal case before him to attempt “an end-run” around that still-pending state litigation.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt welcomed the judge’s decision during a daily briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon.
“The department is pleased,” he said, “that this frivolous lawsuit was dismissed.”
Staff writer Katie Bernard contributed to this article.
Read the opinion: