Republicans lose fight against mail-in voting in New York high court

(CN) — New York’s highest court on Tuesday upheld statewide universal mail-in voting, thwarting a challenge from Republican lawmakers who argue that the practice is unconstitutional.

“We now hold that it is not,” Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote in an 89-page decision in the New York Court of Appeals.

In doing so, the court affirmed a May ruling from the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division’s Third Judicial Department. Both courts rejected the Republicans’ argument that New York’s state constitution mandates that voting specifically occur in-person on election day and the state’s recent Early Mail Voter Act is therefore unconstitutional.

Wilson and the other six judges on the panel conducted an in-depth review of New York’s constitutional history to reach that conclusion. The majority found that, although the state legislature has perhaps assumed otherwise in the past, in-person voting has never been constitutionally required in the state.

“Though the state constitution contains no language that explicitly requires in-person voting, the legislative and executive branches have often proceeded as if our constitution requires as such,” Wilson wrote.

This has caused some “troubling” issues, Wilson acknowledged. He points to 2021, when roughly 55% of voters shot down a proposed amendment to codify absentee voting at the ballot box. After the vote failed, the legislature decided they didn’t need a constitutional amendment after all, and passed the Early Mail Voter Act in 2023.

Prior to that, New Yorkers needed a specified reason to submit a mail-in ballot, including being absent from home, sick or disabled.

“We acknowledge that the public rejected that amendment, and we take seriously both the legislature’s position in 2021 and the voters’ rejection of the proposed constitutional amendment,” Wilson wrote. “At the same time, we may not simply defer to the legislature’s assumptions about what the constitution requires.”

The seven-judge panel had one dissenter: Judge Michael Garcia, who cited that failed 2021 vote in his opinion. Garcia found that the state constitution limits the authority of the legislative and executive branches to enact absentee voting procedures.

Thus, the Early Mail Voter Act is a step too far, according to Garcia.

“Acknowledging that the legislature’s conduct with respect to the failed amendment is ‘troubling’, the majority nevertheless accepts it, making the people’s recent vote to preserve the limitation meaningless,” Garcia wrote. “I cannot join in that result.”

Still, Tuesday’s 6-1 decision is a win for voting rights advocates and New York leadership, which has been warding off this legal attack from Republican lawmakers since last year.

“Generations of Americans fought to secure and protect the right to vote, and we have a responsibility to continue removing the barriers that persist today that prevent far too many people from exercising that right,” Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement Tuesday. “Today’s ruling is a significant victory for democracy and another loss for those who seek to disenfranchise New Yorkers and undermine access to the ballot.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated the ruling in a statement of her own, where she asserted that it is the government’s role to “make it easier for citizens to have their voices heard, not harder.”

U.S. Representatives Elise Stefanik, Nicole Malliotakis, Nicholas Langworthy and Claudia Tenney, alongside other Republican elected officials, voters and the party’s state and national committees, filed their lawsuit against the Early Mail Voter Act on Sept. 20, 2023 — the same day Hochul signed it into law.

Stefanik, a fiery ally to former president Donald Trump, lamented Tuesday’s ruling against the case, calling for New York Republicans to “swamp the ballot box” to vote out state Democrats in response.

“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,” Stefanik said.

State Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox called the upheld law an “affront” to New Yorkers and chided Democrats for, what he claimed, is a “blatant effort to consolidate total, one-party control at every level of government.”

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