By Stephen Peters, DA Global Veterans and Military Families Caucus Vice Chair, U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and Military Spouse

I've spent years in and around policy communications, and I've learned that the fastest way to lose people is to bury them in acronyms. So let me say this as plainly as possible.

If you're a veteran, a service member, or a military spouse living outside the United States, the current Republican majority in Congress has multiple bills moving right now that would make it harder for you to vote. Not by accident. On purpose. And the reason should make you angrier, not more resigned: some Republican lawmakers would rather shrink the electorate than earn the vote.

The GOP’s PROVE Act (H.R. 4851) would take any overseas citizen who can't produce a "current" US address and simply reclassify them as a Washington, D.C. voter — erasing your say in your actual home state's Senate race, your House race, the ballot measures that affect your family back home. 

The SAVE Act, which House Republicans passed 218–213 in February 2026, would require in-person, document-in-hand proof of citizenship to register — effectively ending the mail-based system that has let overseas citizens vote securely for 150 years. Every Senate Democrat has held the line against it. 

Here's the thing that should stop you cold: you already did the hard part. You served, or you married someone who did, or you raised kids through six PCS moves, or you're managing a service-connected disability from four thousand miles away from the nearest VA hospital. You didn't get a vote of confidence handed to you — you earned every bit of the credibility you have on this. And Republicans are telling you that your voice is optional. It isn't. It's just harder to reach, which is a different problem, and one with a very simple fix: request your ballot today, and vote Democrat.

I say this as someone who lives it. I file VA claims from overseas. I've fought with Tricare over ridiculous paperwork. I know what it costs, in hours and patience, to get care that's supposed to be guaranteed to me. And I know that every fix to that system — bills like the Veterans Foreign Medical Coverage Equality and Modernization Act, which would finally give permanently and totally disabled veterans overseas the same coverage they'd get stateside — is sitting in a Republican-controlled committee that hasn't scheduled a vote. That's not an accident of timing. That's what happens when the people running Congress have other priorities.

And those other priorities are visible right now in how Trump’s VA Secretary Doug Collins is running the department under this administration: every net new dollar in his FY2028 budget request is earmarked for outside contractors instead of VA's own hospitals and doctors, and the agency is consolidating its community-care contracts into a deal worth up to a trillion dollars, managed by private health plans. 

The trajectory looks like deliberate privatization. Congressional Democrats have been the ones on record pushing back on this in committee hearings. Republicans have twice pulled their own VA overhaul bill from the House floor rather than defend it in the open.

Democrats are also running more veterans this cycle than in recent memory — at least seventeen veteran Democrats are running in the most competitive Republican-held House districts nationwide. Whatever you think of any individual candidate, the pattern is a party actively recruiting people who've served to go fight for the VA and for overseas voting access from the inside, in the rooms where committee assignments and floor votes actually happen.

None of this gets fixed by being right about it in a group chat. It gets fixed by turning in a ballot for the party that will actually schedule the vote. That's the whole mechanism. Not marching, not posting, not being correct at dinner parties — a piece of paper, postmarked on time, counted in a congressional district you still belong to.

So here's what I'm actually asking you to do, today, not eventually:

Go to VoteFromAbroad.org and file your Federal Post Card Application. It takes about ten minutes. It registers you and requests your ballot in one step. Do it even if you did it two years ago — deadlines and state rules shift, and re-confirming costs you nothing.

Vote Democrat. The House and Senate majorities are the differences between a committee chair who schedules a hearing on overseas veterans' care and one who doesn't. It's the difference between the SAVE Act becoming law and staying blocked.

Then ask three people to do the same. Another veteran. Another military spouse. Someone in your unit's group chat who's been meaning to get around to it. Overseas turnout is a numbers game, and the margin in a lot of these races is going to be small enough that a handful of ballots from your circle could matter.

And don't wait for the news to feel urgent enough. By the time it does, deadlines will have passed. Ballots take longer to arrive and return from overseas than anyone plans for. The safe move is to act now, while there's still slack in the calendar.

You served a country that's currently deciding, in real time, how much your voice counts. The answer to that shouldn't be up to politicians. It should be up to you — and it starts with a ballot request and a vote for the Democratic candidate.

Request your ballot: VoteFromAbroad.org