Never-resident voters, Americans born abroad who have never lived in a US state, are the target of Republican National Committee lawsuits in eight states. The RNC's suit against New Jersey election officials, filed July 9, was the eighth, following Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Nebraska, Colorado and Nevada. A Virginia court heard argument Aug. 5. Nebraska's followed Aug. 6.

The group is a narrow slice of the overseas voters covered by state and federal law. It is also the only slice where courts have started to disagree.

Who counts as a never-resident voter

These are adults who register using the last US address of a parent, legal guardian or, in some states, a spouse. On the Federal Post Card Application, the form overseas Americans use to register, they check a box stating they have "never lived in the United States."

Federal law doesn't reach them. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act protects citizens who left a state, not citizens who never had one. A dozen-plus states filled the gap themselves. North Carolina did it through its Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act, Virginia through Va. Code 24.2-452, and Nebraska through a 2010 statute implementing the federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act.

Nebraska's version is the most explicit of the eight. Neb. Rev. Stat. 32-939 lets a citizen abroad who has never resided anywhere in the United States register in one Nebraska county if a parent is a registered voter there and the citizen isn't registered in another state.

The rulings point in opposite directions

  • Michigan: the trial court dismissed the RNC's second suit April 22, 2026. The RNC appealed May 12. An earlier, nearly identical case died at the Michigan Court of Appeals on Aug. 6, 2025.

  • North Carolina: a Wake County Superior Court judge granted the plaintiffs summary judgment June 9, 2026, holding that people who have never resided in the state cannot register or vote in any North Carolina contest, state or federal.

  • Arizona: filed June 30, 2025. A motion to dismiss for lack of standing, argued in October, is still pending.

  • Virginia, Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada and New Jersey: filed between April 6 and July 9, 2026. No merits ruling in any of them.

The North Carolina order carries a detail the coverage mostly skipped. The judge found the state elections board was acting consistently with the statute. The problem, in his reading, was the statute against the constitution.

What each side argues

The plaintiffs' theory is the same in every complaint. State constitutions make residency a qualification for voting, and a legislature can't satisfy it by borrowing a parent's former address. Virginia's complaint says the Commonwealth "relaxed" its own residency requirement.

The states answer that they've lawfully assigned a voting residence to citizens who would otherwise have none. Nebraska's attorney general reads "resided within" in the state constitution as domicile rather than physical presence, and warns that the plaintiffs' reading would disenfranchise citizens who are Nebraska domiciliaries.

The filings are unusually direct about the political stake. The Nevada complaint states that the practice puts the RNC and its candidates at a "competitive disadvantage" because never-resident voters "overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates." The Virginia complaint uses nearly identical wording. The party line doesn't hold everywhere: Nebraska's defendant is Secretary of State Bob Evnen, a Republican, defended by Republican Attorney General Mike Hilgers.

The counted population is tiny

Nebraska is the only one of the eight states where a number has surfaced. Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Wayne Bena filed an affidavit in July putting 116 voters on the rolls under the challenged provision. Six of them voted in the May 12 primary, when 358,538 Nebraskans cast ballots.

Across the last three cycles, participation by this group ran from five voters in the 2022 primary to 72 in the 2024 general election, between 0.001% and 0.007% of all votes cast. That's consistent with overseas voter turnout near 11% generally, applied to a very small base.

Where citizenship stops being enough

North Carolina supplies the only concrete answer so far, and it's a hard one. A person can hold a US passport, owe US tax on worldwide income and still be ineligible to vote in the state whose law once let them register.

The order doesn't hand those voters another state. No federal statute assigns a voting residence to a citizen who has never had one, so a never-resident struck from North Carolina's rolls has no federal fallback.

Roughly 2.2 million voting-age Americans live abroad. The eight cases will decide how many of them have a ballot to lose.