(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik took a break from calling every elected Democrat a communist to spit bile at her own state’s judiciary. Yesterday the state’s highest court rejected a challenge to no-excuse mail-in voting in which the congresswoman was the named plaintiff.
Governor Kathy Hochul, the named defendant, signed the Early Mail Voter Act in May. The law obligates election clerks to issue mail-in ballots to any voter who requests one and to accept them during the nine-day early voting period. In September Stefanik, various elected New York Republicans, and the RNC sought a declaratory judgment that the law violated the state’s constitution.
Under NY Const. Art. II, § 2:
The legislature may, by general law, provide a manner in which, and the time and place at which, qualified voters who, on the occurrence of any election, may be absent from the county of their residence or, if residents of the city of New York, from the city, and qualified voters who, on the occurrence of any election, may be unable to appear personally at the polling place because of illness or physical disability, may vote and for the return and canvass of their votes.
They argued that the law only permits mail-in ballots from voters who are either physically absent or physically incapable of voting in person. They shed hot tears for the poor election officials forced to “process the many thousands of additional mail-in ballots that will be submitted by voters who are neither absent from their residence upon the occurrence of the relevant election, nor ill or physically disabled at that time.” The candidates bemoaned being forced “to devote significant resources to operate additional and separate voter outreach and mobilization programs directed towards universal mail-voting in addition to their in-person voter outreach and mobilization programs.” And while they weren’t quite willing to press bogus election fraud claims, they hinted darkly about lack of signature verification and the ability of close relatives to request a ballot on behalf of a voter.
But Supreme Court Justice Christina Ryba was unpersuaded and denied the requested injunction in February. And the Third Judicial Department was no more receptive, tossing Stefanik’s appeal in April. And now the Court of Appeals has pissed in Stefanik’s cornflakes yet again with a thoughtful ruling that confronts the central issue head-on.
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. Our Court has never been asked to determine what the Constitution requires in this regard. Recently, the legislature assumed that the Constitution requires in-person voting, passing concurrent resolutions culminating in the 2021 proposed amendment to authorize mail-in voting. 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. At the same time, we may not simply defer to the legislature’s assumptions about what the Constitution requires. Our task is to rigorously analyze the constitutional text and history to determine if New York’s Early Mail Voter Act is unconstitutional. We now hold that it is not.
Citing the legislature’s plenary powers and the strong presumption of regularity, the high court found that nothing in the state’s constitution mandated in-person voting. The lone dissent was from Judge Michael Garcia, who objected that the majority’s ruling upended the clear understanding of both the legislature and the voters who rejected no-excuse absentee voting in the 2021 referendum.
Naturally, Rep. Stefanik has handled the matter with her usual grace and aplomb.
“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,” she said in a statement published on Twitter.
“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,” she concluded.
Well, good luck with that.
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