Three years after New Yorkers said only people with a legitimate excuse should receive a mail-in ballot, a court ruled that a state law overriding the public’s position can remain in place.
The New York State Appellate Division, Third Department granted Democrats’ motion to dismiss an appeal from Republican-affiliated groups challenging New York’s “Early Mail Voter Act,” which was signed into law in 2023. The law allows anyone to obtain an early mail-in ballot. Every Republican in the state legislature opposed the legislation, alongside five Democrats.
The Republican National Committee, Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik and Claudia Tenney, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections and other Republican groups alleged the law was enacted in “defiance of Article II, § 2, ignoring and subverting the will of the People whom the Legislature is supposed to represent.”
New Yorkers had previously issued a resounding “no” when asked to vote on the constitutional amendment in 2021. Prior to the state’s Democrats usurping the will of the people, the New York State Constitution said voters who wanted an absentee ballot had to provide an excuse. Republicans statewide successfully launched a massive campaign against the measure.
But a state Supreme Court judge ruled in February the law was constitutional, eliciting rebuke from New York Republican Party Chair Ed Cox.
“Since the Civil War, New York’s state Constitution has required a constitutional amendment in order to expand absentee voting. The Legislature acknowledged this fact when in 2021 it submitted an amendment for no-excuse absentee voting,” Cox said in a statement.
“Now, our reckless Democrat-controlled Legislature brazenly states that because they don’t call these mail-in ballots ‘absentee’ ballots, they do not require a constitutional amendment — even though the mail-in early vote ballots are identical in every respect to an absentee ballot.”
New Yorkers rejected Proposition 4 more than a year after voters requested approximately 2.5 million absentee or military ballot requests during extensive lockdowns, according to Democrat and Chronicle. Democrats ignored the legal excuse requirement and allowed people to claim they needed to vote absentee to avoid contracting Covid-19.
As a result, the state saw the number of absentee ballot requests balloon. During the 2016 race, 495,520 absentee ballots were requested and 400,660 were returned, according to Democrat and Chronicle. The number of absentee ballots requested quadrupled in 2020.
Permitting no-excuse mail-in ballots is a surefire way to stain the election process. Just ask voters in Queens. Abdul Rahman was indicted by Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz in December after he allegedly submitted 118 absentee ballot applications during the 2022 Democrat primaries.
The scheme was discovered when a voter went to vote in person and was told “an absentee ballot had already been requested in his name.” An investigation determined someone else had requested, filled out, and submitted an application in the man’s name. Rahman was listed as the person authorized to transport the ballot. The voter said he had no idea who Rahman was.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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