RNC Sues To Stop Non-Residents From Voting In Six States
While it seems like common sense that living in a state should be a prerequisite to voting there, the Republican National Committee is suing six states to stop them from doing so.
Fresh off a court win in North Carolina, the RNC has filed lawsuits against Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, and Nebraska, each targeting a version of the same loophole. In these states, a person who has never set foot as a resident within their borders can still cast an absentee ballot there, often because a parent or legal guardian once lived in the state decades ago.
"If you've never lived in a state, you shouldn't be voting in its elections," RNC Chairman Joe Gruters told the Daily Signal.
"The RNC already put a stop to this unconstitutional loophole in North Carolina, and we're taking Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey to court to do the same," Gruters added,
"We'll keep fighting to ensure elections are only decided by legal residents."
The mechanism behind this quirk traces back to federal guidance for overseas voting. According to the Federal Voting Assistance Program website, "In some states, U.S. citizens who were born abroad—and have never resided in the United States—are eligible to vote absentee." Several states extended that logic further than Congress likely intended, allowing people who were born overseas and never lived stateside at all to vote based on a parent's old address.
The RNC is not coming after military voters or diplomats. The committee says it firmly supports the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), the decades-old law that lets service members and foreign service officers vote from wherever the government has stationed them. To secure legal standing in each state, the RNC is partnering with the relevant state party, a candidate, or both.
The North Carolina case set the template. In June, the Wake County Superior Court struck down a state law permitting people born overseas who had never lived in North Carolina to vote there anyway, handing the RNC a win over the state elections board and establishing that these arrangements are vulnerable to a straightforward constitutional challenge.
Nevada is shaping up as the marquee fight of the current round. The RNC has joined the state Republican Party and Republican secretary of state nominee Jim Marchant in challenging a law that allows people who never lived in Nevada, and in some cases never lived in the United States at all, to vote there based solely on a parent's or guardian's past residency. The plaintiffs argue the arrangement violates Nevada's constitution, which requires voters to have "actually, as opposed to constructively" resided in the state. Constructive residency is a fittingly bureaucratic term for a system built on the honor of an ancestor's zip code.
Despite the commonsense nature of the lawsuit, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, called it "an attack on the voting rights of eligible U.S. citizens living abroad" and warned that unwinding the law could hurt military families, even though the RNC made it clear that’s not who their lawsuit is about. "They risk everything to defend our freedoms, including the fundamental right to vote, and Nevada has a responsibility to protect their access to the ballot and the rights of the families who serve alongside them,” he added.
"Children born overseas should not be punished because their parents served, worked, or were stationed outside the United States," Aguilar continued, saying, "Nevada will not turn its back on military families simply because their service took them away from home."
Despite Aguilar’s claims, the lawsuits actually target civilians with no service record and no residency claim beyond a relative's former mailing address, not the men and women stationed abroad under UOCAVA.
“People should have full faith and confidence in the system,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said last week. “What we want is to have elections be safe and secure. We want everybody who's eligible to vote to be able to vote. But I don't know why it's so hard. The question is, why do we have 150 lawsuits trying to make sure we protect democracy and try to make sure these elections are safe and secure? It's because the other side knows they'll do everything in their ability to hold on to power and control.”
Gruters added, “And that's why they're allowing tens of millions of illegals into the country, they want them to be able to eventually have voting rights, and so we've stopped, you know, non-citizens from voting. Some of our biggest wins is knocking them off the voting rules. But the work never ends.”
Democrats will do ANYTHING to gain power, including cheating.
— Chairman Joe Gruters (@ChairmanGruters) July 16, 2026
That's why the RNC is fighting on the ground and in the courts across the country to secure our elections. pic.twitter.com/AuF7LR7HoC