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New York’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a law allowing all registered voters to vote by mail, rejecting a Republican challenge to the legislation.

The 6-1 ruling by the state Court of Appeals confirmed that the voting expansion law, approved by the Legislature last year, is constitutional. The lawsuit, part of a broader GOP effort to tighten voting rules following the 2020 election, was spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Challengers contended that the state constitution requires most voters to cast their ballots in person. However, Chief Judge Rowan Wilson, writing for the majority, stated that although the issue was “difficult” and unprecedented for the high court, there is no such constitutional mandate.

The ruling ensures that millions of New Yorkers will have the option to vote by mail in the November 5 election, a change from the previous system where only a small portion of voters could do so. This shift follows a series of rule changes initiated in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Associated Press reported.

Republicans blasted the ruling. “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 in a statement.

Democrats, not surprisingly, praised the ruling, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James.

“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,” Hochul said.

Prior to the 2018 presidential election, New Yorkers could only vote by absentee ballot under specific circumstances, such as military service, travel abroad, or illness. However, in the spring of 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order allowing mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spread at indoor polling sites.

In the 2020 presidential election, over 1.5 million New Yorkers used absentee ballots, with a noticeable trend of Democrats more frequently choosing mail-in voting compared to Republicans.

Democrats led efforts to make mail-in voting a permanent option in New York via a 2021 constitutional amendment. However, the proposal was defeated following a conservative campaign warning of potential voter fraud and concerns about delays in election result reporting due to the lengthy absentee ballot counting process.

Lawmakers subsequently revised the state’s voting rules without amending the constitution by implementing the Early Mail Voter Act, which took effect in January.

In his majority opinion, Wilson expressed that it was “troubling” that state lawmakers moved forward with legislation to expand mail-in voting so soon after the proposed constitutional amendment had failed.

“The voters considered the proposition and voted against it. Having lost the question before the voters, the legislature then decided that no constitutional amendment was required and passed the Act,” Wilson wrote. “Upholding the Act in these circumstances may be seen by some as disregarding the will of those who voted in 2021.”

“But our role,” he wrote, “is to determine what our Constitution requires, even when the resulting analysis leads to a conclusion that appears, or is, unpopular.”

The court’s majority noted that it reviewed versions of the state constitution dating back to 1777 and found no explicit language mandating in-person voting. However, Wilson remarked that lawmakers and leaders have frequently operated under the assumption that such a requirement exists.

In the lone dissent, Judge Michael Garcia wrote that the state constitution had been understood for more than 200 years to limit absentee voting to people unable to appear at the polls in person, the AP noted. “The ‘no excuse’ universal mail voting legislation violates that constitutional limitation,” he wrote.

In addition, the Democrat-led state legislature’s decision to change the law after the proposed constitutional amendment failed essentially told voters, “We never needed you anyway.” He added that the court has “both the power and the duty to remedy what happened here, and our failure to do so diminishes us and nullifies the will of the People.”

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