The Federal Post Card Application is the form an American outside the country fills out to register and request a ballot. Since 2013 it has carried five boxes to describe who you are: active-duty military, a military family member, a citizen abroad who intends to return, a citizen abroad whose return is uncertain, and a citizen abroad who has never lived in the United States. On August 26 the Department of War, which administers the form through the Federal Voting Assistance Program, asked the Office of Management and Budget for emergency authority to remove the fifth box.
OMB granted it on August 28. The revised form went out in the last days of August, nine weeks before a federal election and three weeks before the September 19 date by which every state is required by federal law to have mailed ballots to its voters overseas. The same change was made to the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, the backup form a voter uses when the real ballot fails to arrive. No notice was published and no public comment was taken, which is what the word emergency buys.
On Thursday the Democratic National Committee sued in federal court in Washington, arguing the department invented an emergency to skip the procedure the law requires. That is the whole story, and it is small, and it is worth every word of what follows, because the people on the other end of the deleted box are the children of Americans.
Who the box was for
A citizen can be born abroad to American parents, hold an American passport from birth, and never have lived in the United States. The children of diplomats, aid workers, teachers, oil engineers, and, in large numbers, service members stationed overseas fall into this category. Under federal law they are citizens, and under the law of thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, by the DNC’s count, they may vote in federal elections from the state where a parent last lived. Congress wrote the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act in 1986 to guarantee that Americans abroad could register and vote by mail; the states extended that guarantee to the abroad-born under their own constitutions; and in 2013 the federal form added a box so that those voters could describe themselves truthfully. As of this summer, about 11,590 of them were registered. In 2024, civilians made up roughly 59 percent of the voters registered under the law and military members and their families about 40 percent.
The revised form offers a civilian abroad two choices: intends to return, or return uncertain. Each requires a sworn attestation. A twenty-year-old born in Stuttgart to an Army sergeant, who has never set foot in Georgia and has no plan to, cannot truthfully check either one. Nothing on the form tells that voter she is ineligible. The only line that fit her has been removed, and she is left to choose between a false oath and no ballot.
How the department explained it
The emergency request to OMB was signed by Sean O’Keefe, the deputy under secretary for personnel and readiness. The stated reason was that the current format “may confuse voters” about what federal law requires them to provide. A department statement after the suit was filed said the removed box described citizens “not within the class of voters specifically defined by UOCAVA,” and declined further comment on pending litigation.
The second half of that is true as far as it goes. The federal statute defines overseas voters by reference to residence in the United States, and it is the states, not Congress, that chose to enfranchise citizens who never had one. But the states made that choice lawfully, decades ago, and the federal form has accommodated it for thirteen years without recorded confusion. The president of the U.S. Vote Foundation, Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, whose organization has helped overseas Americans with this exact form for twenty years, said the new version “will create far more confusion than we ever encountered.” The executive director of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents military families, said they were “stakeholders who should have been included,” and were not consulted. A department that believed its form was confusing could have proposed a fix in the spring, published it, taken comment, and had a clean form in place for 2028. It chose instead to file an emergency in the last week of August, inside the ninety-day window before a federal election, and change the form the week ballots were being printed.
Why now
The timing makes sense only against a campaign that has been running since 2024. That fall the Republican National Committee sued Michigan and North Carolina to stop never-resident citizens from voting, arguing the state laws that allowed it violated state constitutions. Both suits were dismissed before the election. The RNC kept going. In 2025 the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled 4 to 2 that never-residents could not vote in state and local races. In May of this year a special superior court judge in the same state, Hoyt Tessener, extended that to federal elections. The RNC filed in Arizona in June and has said more states are coming. In March 2025 the president’s executive order on elections directed, among other things, that overseas voters supply passport documentation and proof of state eligibility, provisions the courts have mostly blocked. The SAVE Act, which passed the House in April, would require a citizen registering from abroad to present citizenship documents “in person to the office of the appropriate election official,” which for a voter in Stuttgart means a flight.
Each of those efforts had to go through a court or a legislature, and most of them stalled there. The form change went through neither. The Pentagon achieved by paperwork, in two days, in thirty-eight states at once, what the RNC had managed by litigation in one. Nobody in the department has said that was the purpose, and the lawsuit does not need them to. The Administrative Procedure Act asks whether an agency followed the process, and whether the stated reason for skipping it was real. The emergency, on the record, was that an election was approaching. Elections approach on a schedule published two years in advance.
The argument that it does not matter
There is one, and it is numerical. Eleven thousand five hundred ninety registered voters, spread over thirty-eight states, in a country of 160 million registered, is a rounding error. If every one of them is turned away, no statewide race changes. The affected population is also, by the reporting, mixed in its politics: these are the children of soldiers as often as the children of Peace Corps volunteers.
The reply is that the number is the least of it. The method is the story. Eligibility to vote in a federal election has been narrowed, for a defined class of citizens, by a form revision an agency pushed through under an emergency designation, without notice, after the statutory ballot deadline had already been set, in a year the same agency’s department was asked by the president to find ways to tighten overseas voting. If that holds, it is a template, and templates get reused at scale. The next class is whoever the next checkbox describes.
Where it sits
This publication keeps a running record of the offices and programs that used to stand between an election and this kind of change on The Dismantling Tracker. Most of that page is subtraction: the FBI’s foreign-influence unit disbanded, the election-security staff at CISA sent home, the information-sharing network for state election officials defunded, the intelligence center that named foreign interference absorbed into nothing. The FPCA change is the other side of the ledger, the first clear case this cycle of the federal government using an administrative lever to decide who votes rather than merely declining to protect the vote. The DNC’s suit asks a judge to restore the box before November 3. The ballots went out on September 19. For a voter born abroad who filled out the new form in September and checked nothing, because nothing was true, the remedy will arrive after the count.
These people need to be impeached.
The sadness grows, bit by bit. Arrogant, selfish people are destroying my country.