ALBANY, NY (AP) — A New York state law allowing all registered voters to vote by mail was upheld Tuesday by the state’s highest court, which dismissed a Republican lawsuit against the law.
The 6-1 ruling by the state appeals court upheld lower courts’ ruling that the voting expansion law passed by the House last year did not violate the state constitution. The lawsuit was part of a broader Republican effort to tighten voting rules after the 2020 election and was led by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik.
Opponents argued that the state constitution requires most people to vote in person. Chief Justice Rowan Wilson wrote in the majority opinion that while the question is “difficult” and the Supreme Court has never considered it before, there is no such requirement.
The decision means that the millions of New Yorkers expected to vote in the November 5 election will be able to cast their ballots by mail if they so wish – something only a fraction of people could do before a series of rule changes started in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans condemned the court’s decision.
“New York’s court system is so corrupt and scandalous that today’s ruling essentially declares that New York’s elected officials, voters and judges have misunderstood their own state’s Constitution for over 150 years and that in-person voting outside of the currently legal mail-in voting process was never necessary,” Stefanik said in a prepared statement.
Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James were among New York Democrats who praised the ruling.
“Generations of Americans have fought to secure and protect the right to vote, and we have a responsibility to continue to dismantle the barriers that still exist today and prevent far too many people from exercising that right,” Hochul said in a written statement.
In the 2018 presidential election, New York residents were only able to cast their vote by mail if they were unable to vote in person for certain reasons, such as military service, a trip abroad, or illness.
That changed dramatically in the spring of 2020, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order allowing people to vote by mail to stop the potential spread of COVID-19 at polling places. At the time, thousands of people in the state were dying from the virus.
More than 1.5 million New Yorkers cast their vote by mail in that year’s presidential election. Both in New York and elsewhere, Democrats were more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.
Democrats first tried to make mail-in voting permanent in New York through a constitutional amendment in 2021, but voters rejected the proposal after a campaign by conservatives who said it would lead to voter fraud. There were also concerns at the time that the sometimes weeks-long process of counting mail-in ballots Delay in the announcement of the election results.
Lawmakers then changed the state’s voting rules without amending the Constitution through the Early Mail Voter Act, which took effect in January.
In his majority opinion, Wilson wrote that it was “troubling” that state lawmakers had pushed forward legislation to expand mail-in voting so soon after the failure of the proposed constitutional amendment.
“Voters considered the proposal and voted against it. After the question lost before the voters, the legislature decided that no constitutional amendment was needed and passed the bill,” Wilson wrote. “Upholding the law under these circumstances could be viewed by some as disregarding the will of those who voted in 2021.”
“But our role,” he added, “is to determine what our Constitution requires, even if the resulting analysis leads to a conclusion that appears or is unpopular.”
The court majority said it had reviewed versions of the state constitution dating back to 1777 and concluded that it now “no longer contains language expressly requiring in-person voting.” But Wilson said lawmakers and politicians have often acted as if that were the case.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Michael Garcia said the state constitution has been understood for more than 200 years to limit absentee voting to people who cannot appear in person at the polling place. “The ‘no excuse’ universal absentee voting legislation violates this constitutional limitation,” he wrote.
Moreover, he said, the legislature’s decision to change the law after the proposed constitutional amendment failed essentially made it clear to voters: “We never needed you anyway.” He said the court has “both the power and the duty to right what happened here, and our failure to do so diminishes our standing and defeats the will of the people.”
