The Fight To Vote By Mail
The largest effort in history to expand access to voting by mail is underway, with lawsuits filed in at least 16 states to ensure people can exercise their rights even during a dangerous pandemic. Political partisans and voting rights advocates alike are fighting in court to ensure every vote is counted in November and everyone who wants to vote has the opportunity.
And, in the lower courts, they’re winning.
A judge in Nashville, Tennessee, ruled in June that “the evidence does not support” the state’s argument that it would be “impossible” to drop its stringent requirements to obtain an absentee ballot during the coronavirus pandemic. With that decision, Tennessee joined the vast majority of states in allowing anyone to obtain an absentee ballot for the 2020 election.
In South Carolina, a federal district judge ordered the state to drop witness requirements for absentee ballots for its June primaries. The same happened in Minnesota. Plaintiffs in both cases are still suing to apply these changes to the November general election. In spite of opposition from President Donald Trump, who has baselessly claimed that voting by mail will lead to mass fraud even though he and top allies have voted by mail this year and in years past, there is infinitesimal evidence of mail-in voting fraud.
“The current times we are in, where voting in person can pose a significant threat to your health, denying vote-by-mail is unconstitutional,” said Danielle Lang, a voting rights lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center. “It is not a convenience.”
The vast majority of the vote-by-mail lawsuits have been brought by Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias through the party-linked nonprofit Priorities USA and on behalf of other groups. Elias has been involved in vote-by-mail lawsuits in 14 states so far in 2020. Voting rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, League of Women Voters and Campaign...
