Mariam Larson lives in the Canadian province of British Columbia but has been voting by mail for decades in Pennsylvania.
This year, like she usually does for federal elections, she requested an absentee ballot and returned it in late October.
Last Friday, she said she was stunned to receive a notice from her local board of elections telling her that her ballot was being challenged by a name she did not recognize. The challenge said she was living outside of the country, not a member of the military, and therefore was not registered to vote in Pennsylvania and could not cast a ballot. She could call or write to the election office in Lycoming county in north central Pennsylvania or appear at a hearing on 8 November.
Larson is one of more than 4,000 overseas voters who had their ballots challenged in 14 counties in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as well as reports from the news outlets Votebeat and LancasterOnline.
“I was confused, and I tried to understand what the dispute was,” Larson said in an interview on 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 kind of an implied threat that I’d done something wrong,” she said.
Pennsylvania law requires someone to be a resident of the state to vote. But the challenges are not valid, the ACLU says, because federal law allows American citizens to vote in federal elections in the last place in the US they lived if they are living overseas and are unsure if they will return to the US. The ACLU said the challenges appear to be a mass effort done through a mail-merge process.
In 2020, 26,952 overseas voters from Pennsylvania successfully returned ballots that were counted.
“The proper course of action for any county receiving mass challenges to these federally qualified ‘overseas voters’ is to summarily reject the challenges as both procedurally and substantively deficient,” lawyers for the ACLU wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state. “Counties should formally dismiss or deny the challenges as quickly as possible to minimize any delay or disruption to the canvassing process,” lawyers for the ACLU wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state.
So far officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming county have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman.
The person who filed Larsons’ challenge was Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer with a group called the Election Research Institute. DiSalvo recently lost a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of overseas voters that a federal judge said was based on “phantom fears of foreign malfeasance”. The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a prominent activist who has spread false claims about elections.
Judges have dismissed similar challenges to overseas voters in North Carolina and Michigan.
Pennsylvania allows voters to challenge the mail-in ballot of other voters. It is not clear how the Pennsylvania counties will handle the challenges. Even if they are dismissed, they underscore how Donald Trump and allies are already seeding doubt about the election. The ex-president falsely suggested in September that votes from overseas voters are fraudulent.
Recent polls show Pennsylvania is essentially tied, and its 19 electoral votes are being closely fought over by both campaigns. Since the race is so close, both campaigns are fiercely fighting over rules that could affect whether certain mail-in votes count.
The Pennsylvania supreme court ruled last week that voters who forget to write the date on their ballots will not have their votes counted. Both the state supreme court and the US supreme court also recently ruled that voters who forget to place their ballot in a protective secrecy sleeve can cast a provisional vote on election day.
In both cases, Republicans sought to block the votes from being counted over technical deficiencies.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:
How the electoral college works
Lessons from the key swing states
What’s at stake in this election
