New York Court Upholds State’s Mail-in Voting Laws

During the pandemic, various states around the country circumvented state legislation to enable new voting laws to make it easier to cast a ballot with the pandemic restrictions in place.

Many of these laws were later challenged for having violated state constitutions.

Among them were the laws in New York for mail-in voting, but the courts have ruled in favor of keeping those laws in place.

Why Bother…

One of the most frustrating things for me about the pandemic in terms of voter accessibility was in how many states did not pass new laws, they were just pushed through.

I lost count of how many state constitutions were violated, but to the courts, this does not seem to matter.

New York is a perfect example, where this issue has been litigated, and again, the court sided with the new rules.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) led the lawsuit in the state, but she lost her case in the lower courts, which ruled the new rules did not violate the state constitution.

She just appealed her case, and the appeals court voted 6-1 in favor of supporting the lower court ruling to keep the current mail-in voting laws in place.

Stefanik was clearly upset over the ruling, stating, “New York’s court system is so corrupt and disgraceful that today’s ruling has essentially declared that for over 150 years, New York’s elected officials, voters, and judges misunderstood their own state’s Constitution, and that in-person voting was never required outside the current legal absentee process.

“It’s never been clearer: the only path forward to Save New York is to get commonsense New Yorkers to swamp the ballot box and vote Republican up and down the ballot and rid ourselves of New York’s politically corrupt Democrats.”

Democrat Governor Hochul, of course, took a victory lap, stating, “Generations fought to secure & protect the right to vote.

“We have a responsibility to remove barriers that still prevent far too many from exercising that right.”

The only dissenting vote on the panel was by Judge Michael Garcia, a Republican, who stated that the state’s constitution has strongly restricted absentee voting for more than two centuries, yet with the swipe of a pen, that has been discounted.

As I have said before, if you want to know the outcome of a case, you need only look at the ideology of the judges.