North Carolina appeals court rejects RNC request to set aside ballots from overseas voters who never lived in state

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — The North Carolina Court of Appeals on Tuesday unanimously rejected a Republican bid to have election officials segregate overseas ballots cast by people who have never resided in the state for additional checks of the voters’ eligibility.

The court’s decision is the latest blow to Republican efforts to attack overseas ballots in critical battleground states.

Earlier Tuesday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a challenge to the vetting procedures for overseas ballots in that state. And last week, a state judge in Michigan sided against the GOP in a case targeting ballots cast by people who had never lived there but were eligible to vote in the state because of familial ties to it.

The Republican National Committee sued North Carolina in early October to block a policy that allows citizens abroad to cast ballots in the state if their parents resided there before leaving the country, even if the voters themselves never lived there.

The law permitting such votes was passed with bipartisan support in 2011 and has been in effect in every election since 2012, but Republicans argued in their suit that it ran afoul of the state constitution’s requirement that limits voting in the state’s elections “to North Carolina residents and only North Carolina residents.” They claimed that it could expose the election to “fraud and other misconduct.”

Last week, Wake County Superior Court Judge John W. Smith denied the RNC’s request for an emergency court order that would require election officials to set aside ballots from overseas voters who hadn’t themselves lived in the state. The judge said that “there is absolutely no evidence that any person has ever fraudulently claimed (the exemption at issue) and actually voted in any North Carolina election.”

The RNC quickly appealed to the Court of Appeals, making the same request that Smith turned down.

The North Carolina State Board of Election and Democratic National Committee, which intervened in the case to defend the state law, pressed the appeals court to maintain the status quo by declining to segregate the ballots, warning that a ruling in favor of the RNC would invite chaos into an election that is already underway.

“It is difficult to conceive of an outcome more disruptive, unanticipated, or unfair than throwing out the ballots of U.S. citizens who have already voted in good-faith reliance on a statute that has been in place for more than thirteen years,” attorneys for the state told the appeals court.

State officials announced Tuesday afternoon that nearly 2.3 million ballots had already been cast in the general election, a figure that included more than 15,000 overseas votes and just under 5,000 military ballots.

Though North Carolina’s policy of accepting ballots from overseas voters has been on the books for several years, starting in 2016, civilian voters abroad began outnumbering the military vote overseas – which itself is not as conservative as it once was.

Democrats announced earlier this cycle a six-figure investment into turning out eligible Democrats abroad, particularly those who can vote in battleground states.

CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.

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