Judge rejects GOP lawmakers' lawsuit on Pennsylvania overseas votes

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Pennsylvania threw out a lawsuit Tuesday from Republican congressmen seeking a tougher verification process for overseas votes from U.S. citizens, including military officials.

Judge Christopher C. Conner in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania wrote in a ruling that the House members and current candidates for reelection did not have a right to bring the lawsuit, waited too long to file the litigation and failed to express in the case a “viable cause of action.”

Conner, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, added that the lawmakers provided “no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit,” and that “hypothetical concerns” from lawmakers about the impact to their individual elections were “purely speculative.”

The six Pennsylvania Republicans who filed the lawsuit are Reps. Guy Reschenthaler, Scott Perry, Dan Meuser, Glenn “GT” Thompson, Lloyd K. Smucker and Mike Kelly.

The lawsuit also raised the prospect that Iranian nationals could exploit the overseas voting process, pointing to an indictment about election interference. But the judge found the indictment showed no vulnerabilities on the part of Pennsylvania.

“Pressed for anything that might corroborate whether ‘there’s been some Iranian influence over Pennsylvania’s overseas ballots,’ counsel effectively conceded that all he had was ‘concerns,’” Conner wrote in the 21-page ruling.

“Plaintiffs cannot rely on phantom fears of foreign malfeasance to excuse their lack of diligence,” the federal judge wrote.

The group of House Republican lawmakers brought the lawsuit in Pennsylvania last month, in part asking the court to require election officials to segregate oversea ballots until the eligibility and identity of the applicant could be verified.

The judge on Tuesday described the requests from Republican lawmakers as a “nonstarter.”

“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.

The Democratic National Committee and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party were allowed to intervene in the case.

The lawsuit received sharp criticism from a group of six House Democrats, who accused Republican lawmakers of attempting to usurp voting rights from members of the military.

“These Americans who raised their right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution may be stripped of one of the most fundamental rights it guarantees,” the six House lawmakers said in a letter sent to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.

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