Luis Segovia, a veteran and former resident of Illinois who now lives in Guam, filed a complaint [text] on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois [official website] claiming the laws affording residents of certain US territories the right to vote and not affording the same right to others are unconstitutional. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) [text, PDF] and the Illinois Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment law (MOVE) [text, PDF] allow former Illinois residents to continue voting in Illinois by absentee ballot for presidential and US Senate and US House of Representatives elections if they reside in the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI), American Samoa, or in a foreign country, but not if they reside in Guam, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Segovia, and other US citizens living in these territories, argue that the laws violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment [text] and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment [text]. The plaintiffs also seek an injunction that would allow them to cast an absentee ballot in the upcoming federal election.

In 2012 the US Supreme Court [official website] denied certiorari [JURIST report] in a case challenging Puerto Ricans’ inability to vote in US presidential elections. The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit [official website] had ruled [opinion, PDF] in 2010 that Puerto Ricans could not vote because Puerto Rico is not a state. The court pointed out that the Constitution explicitly distinguishes between states and territories and only state citizens received congressional representation. Supporters of Puerto Ricans’ right to vote argued that Puerto Rico was functionally equivalent to a state, thus it should be permitted to elect congressional representatives. However, the court found that there is a difference between functional equivalency and actual equivalency and also that no prior case law had accepted the “functional equivalent” argument. Supporters also argued that because Puerto Ricans had been granted citizenship, they therefore had the right to vote because voting is fundamental to citizenship. However, the court stated that the Constitution explicitly grants the right to vote to residents of the states, not citizens.