Preliminary election results announced right after an election often include the caveat that officials still need to count the overseas military ballots before finalizing results.
The general voting population in the United States promptly ignores that caveat and runs with the preliminary results. To them, overseas votes are an afterthought.
Voters Who Never Lived in the US
Absentee voting privileges for those living outside the United States were once only for military members serving abroad. But many people living outside the country can vote, including some who have never lived in the United States.Passed by Congress in 1986, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) allows absentee voting by members of the U.S. military and merchant marine; their family members; and U.S. citizens residing outside the United States.
No Longer Mostly Military
In the past, most UOCAVA voters were connected to the military, a bloc that often leans Republican.Increased Overseas Voting During Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic caused the United States to advise Americans abroad to return home. Business people, study-abroad students, religious missionaries, and holiday travelers returned to the United States in great numbers.
IRS records obtained by Verity Vote show at least 805,000 fewer U.S. taxpayers abroad in 2020 than in 2019. By law, citizens abroad must adhere to tax reporting responsibilities.
“Massive repatriation, a sharp reduction in citizens living overseas, and restrictions on traveling to foreign countries, all decreased the number of U.S. citizens eligible to claim UOCAVA privileges,” the Verity Vote report stated.
Post Card Application by Email
The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, sponsored in 2009 by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), requires all states to accept the Federal Post Card Application as both a voter registration form and an official request for an absentee ballot.States must accept this card even in the absence of the requester’s proof of identity or citizenship.
An applicant who checks the box indicating that he or she has never lived in the United States isn’t required to provide a Social Security number or a U.S.-issued driver’s license. Such an applicant can still receive an absentee ballot and vote in federal elections.
Instructions on the Federal Post Card Application available online request a U.S. address but read, “You do not need to have any current ties with this address.”
“The applicant must provide a foreign address but can choose to have the ballot delivered via email which renders the foreign address obsolete as a security feature,” the Verity Vote report stated.
An email ballot is printed with a voter’s home computer and mailed in.
“When you email a ballot to somebody, you are eliminating the important verification of delivering a ballot to an address where they say they are,” Heather Honey of Verity Vote said during a recent voter integrity presentation at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Harrisburg.
“If I request a mail ballot in Hershey [Pennsylvania], they’re going to have to mail it to Hershey. If they can’t deliver it to me, the post office is not supposed to forward it. That’s a sort of confirmation that at least it was delivered to that address,” Honey said.
“But if I say I’m in Italy, and I say, ‘Email me the ballot,’ there is no verification that I’m in Italy. There’s no verification that I’m even out of the country. I could be in Harrisburg and request the ballot. So this is a big problem.”
If anyone can get a ballot sent to an email address without verifying their identity, the system, she indicated, is ripe for fraud.
Consider these numbers from the Verity Vote report: The Federal Voting Assistance Program estimated that more than 41,000 UOCAVA ballots were returned from Canada, the largest number from any country, yet the Department of Defense reports fewer than 1,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Canada.
Arizona allows UOCAVA voters to return their voted ballots by email, fax, or online portal upload, creating another vulnerability as those ballots are printed and counted in counties.
Voter Registration Effort
The only two partner organizations identified by the Federal Voting Assistance Program are VotefromAbroad.org and the U.S. Vote Foundation, the Verity Vote report stated.“Vote from Abroad advises people on how to use a VPN. While this might be helpful in circumstances where foreign IP addresses are blocked by a particular jurisdiction, it also obscures the origin of ballot requests and submissions.”
Both organizations identify as nonpartisan, but the public disclosure on the Vote from Abroad website states that it’s a public service of Democrats Abroad, the “official Democratic Party arm for the 9 million Americans living outside the United States.” The first step in requesting a ballot is to fill out a form on the Vote from Abroad website. Voters share personal data that become accessible to the Democratic Party.
U.S. Vote Foundation’s website states that it isn’t connected with any U.S. government organization but also that it’s partly funded by state and federal research grants. Self-described as a nonprofit, nonpartisan charity, it’s also supported through its provision of voter services, private foundation grants, and individual donations. Foundation grantors have included the following left-leaning organizations: The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, JEHT Foundation, The Democracy Fund, BlackRock, and the Knight Foundation.
In 2009, Pew released a report stating that military voters were being denied their right to vote in 2008 because of voting impediments. The report, funded by JEHT Foundation, was used as justification by Schumer to advocate for electronic delivery of ballots to unverified nonmilitary requestors claiming to be U.S. citizens living overseas, the Verity Vote report claims.
Results Skewed
The increase in overseas nonmilitary ballots alone is a remarkable anomaly, and it disproportionately benefited Democratic candidates, Verity Vote said.Most counties don’t keep records of overseas ballots, but a few counties had circumstances that revealed unexpected results in the 2020 presidential election.
“The only reported full hand recount of electronically returned UOCAVA ballots was conducted in Maricopa County, Arizona. The tally revealed a significant deviation from the razor-thin 50–50 results in the state. The presidential selection on the UOCAVA ballots favored Biden over Trump, 74 percent to 26 percent.”
In Fulton County, Georgia, a hand recount of a batch of 950 UOCAVA ballots had zero votes for Donald Trump and 100 percent for Joe Biden, the Verity Vote report stated.
A poll worker in a Louisiana county reported that 80 percent of UOCAVA ballots were for Biden.
In Cobb County, Georgia, a poll observer challenged the authenticity of the UOCAVA ballots when she realized that 80 to 90 percent were votes for Biden.
A judge of elections in Colorado observed that the UOCAVA ballots were 95 percent for Biden, the report said.
In the city of Richmond, Virginia, a poll worker who hand-tallied about 1,000 ballots showed 85 to 90 percent for Biden.
“The Help America Vote Act requires states to verify the identity of voters prior to accepting ballots in federal elections. Overseas U.S. citizens are subject to the same federal law. The few overseas persons who can claim U.S. citizenship but who have never resided in the U.S. and who have never been issued a Social Security number, should be required to provide a passport number or some other verifiable form of identification to prove identity and eligibility,” the Verity Vote report reads.
States That Accept ‘Never Resided’ Votes
In some states, U.S. citizens who were born abroad and have never resided in the United States are eligible to vote absentee. The following states allow these citizens to vote absentee:- Alaska
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Maine
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
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