A conspiracy theory about overseas voting spread from an election denial website to Trump — and now to the MAGA media infrastructure

Conservative pundits are mischaracterizing a longstanding law that allows US citizens abroad to vote

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Madeline Peltz

Published

Right-wing media figures have amplified a conspiracy theory that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election by weaponizing a longstanding law that allows Americans overseas to vote.

As researchers at the University of Washington explained, right-wing junk site The Gateway Pundit appears to have originated the false claim in early September, and former President Donald Trump promoted it later that month.

The September 6 Gateway Pundit blog mischaracterized a Democratic Party press release announcing a plan to register Americans living overseas to vote through a 1986 law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). The article’s headline falsely claimed that the get-out-the-vote effort — a first from the Democratic National Committee — was an “Undetectable Way to Steal the Election From Trump,” rather than a legal avenue to reach voters.

“The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on September 23. “Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!”

David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The Associated Press, “In over 25 years of working in elections, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and with election officials of both parties, I don’t recall any of them, or any elected leader from either party, ever denigrating this important program, until Trump’s false claims this week.”

Shortly after Trump endorsed The Gateway Pundit’s misinformation, Republican officials in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan filed lawsuits challenging aspects of UOCAVA and related laws designed to facilitate overseas voting. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent election denier and former Trump adviser who attempted to overturn the 2020 election, said on a right-wing radio show that she’d “helped to organize” the suits in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, adding that she hoped to file another, similar suit in Wisconsin.

Several right-wing media outlets and pundits further spread the conspiracy theory that Democrats will “exploit” UOCAVA to register “bad actors” ahead of the 2024 election.

  • The Gateway Pundit has published several additional articles mischaracterizing UOCAVA:

    • One article claimed that UOCAVA “could very well be the key to how Democrats plan to steal our upcoming election from President Trump.”

    • Another stated that “UOCAVA opens the door to unlimited foreign voter voting.”

    • A third argued that Democrats were using UOCAVA to “exploit weaknesses in Federal law in order to use noncitizens as political pawns to achieve desired outcomes."

  • True the Vote founder and election denial activist Catherine Engelbrecht cast doubt on overseas voting, suggesting it would be used by noncitizens and adding, “Without the data for citizenship, you cannot tell. It's outrageous.” (As the University of Washington researchers pointed out, state laws vary but overseas voters need to validate their eligibility prior to casting a ballot.) Engelbrecht concluded that “the fraud’s been institutionalized.”

  • Claiming she “helped to organize” two lawsuits challenging overseas voting, Cleta Mitchell said without evidence that UOCAVA had been “exploited, and they’re literally getting people to lie and say that they’re overseas, or to say that they’re citizens, and the states are not checking at all.”

  • Former Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington celebrated the Pennsylvania lawsuit, writing: “5 Congressman just filed a lawsuit in PA over Democrats refusal to verify identity in the overseas ballot program. There are 25,000 UOCAVA ballots in PA already for 2024 and only 3,600 —14% — are to military members and their family."

  • Right-wing website The National Pulse praised the Pennsylvania lawsuit as well, claiming the overseas voting process “could be open to bad actors.”

  • Joel Barry, managing editor of right-wing satire site the Babylon Bee, wrote that UOCAVA is part of “the Democrat plan to steal elections using ‘overseas’ ballots.”

  • Right-wing blog The Federalist baselessly warned of the potential for fraud, writing that it is “hypothetically possible to sit in Anytown, U.S.A., and request that a UOCAVA ballot be emailed to you, while claiming you are in another country.”

  • Caroline Wren — an adviser to prominent election denier and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake — criticized the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign for failing to file a lawsuit in Arizona challenging “the UOCAVA overseas ‘voters.’”

  • Right-wing website Just the News wrote that “Republicans and election integrity advocates are sounding the alarm over possible fraud that could occur with absentee ballots sent from other countries.”

  • Conservative activist and election denier Heather Honey appeared on a Rumble stream to baselessly claim that “some of the provisions” of UOCAVA are a little bit loosey goosey” and that Democrats and associated nongovernmental organizations are “not telling people on social media that there are citizenship requirements.” (At least two of the examples she used in her presentation included the word “citizen” in the advertisement.)

The right-wing targeting of UOCAVA comes against the backdrop of a larger conservative campaign to spread fear that noncitizens will vote in large numbers in November (there is no evidence to support that allegation, but Fox News and other right-wing networks have saturated their airwaves with it).

The GOP has its own outreach program to Americans abroad called Republicans Overseas — one of more than 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing effort to provide policy and staffing to a second Trump administration.

In 2021, Republicans Overseas vice chairman and CEO Solomon Yue — who is also a Republican National Committee member — wrote a resolution for the Oregon Republican Party that falsely claimed there was “growing evidence” that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” intended to “to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans,” according to The New York Times.