ELECTION CHANGES
Please bookmark our litigation tracker for a complete summary of the latest developments in every lawsuit regarding changes to elections and voting procedures as a result of the coronavirus.
• Georgia: A federal district court has sided with the Democratic plaintiffs and ruled that Georgia officials must count absentee mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within three days afterward. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office announced that it would quickly appeal the ruling.
However, the court rejected several other requests by Democrats, including that the state prepay the postage on mail ballots, require timely notification of problems with absentee ballot applications, and allow third parties such as community groups to collect and submit ballots on behalf of voters. Democrats have not indicated if they will appeal that part of the ruling.
• Iowa: National Democrats have filed a lawsuit in state court challenging GOP Secretary of State Paul Pate's directive to disqualify absentee mail ballot request forms that officials in a handful of Democratic-leaning counties had sent to voters with pre-filled information. This lawsuit comes after county judges in Linn and Woodbury Counties sided with the Trump campaign in separate litigation to invalidate their pre-filled absentee requests, which included 64,000 that had already been submitted by voters, while a third Trump lawsuit over pre-filled request forms in Johnson County remains pending.
Republican lawmakers passed a law earlier this year to enable the mailing of absentee applications to all voters statewide, but they prohibited pre-filled forms following their passage of a separate law that requires county officials to contact voters for missing information even when they could complete an application on a voter's behalf using the state's database.
Since one piece of information required is a state-issued voter "PIN," something that virtually no voter is likely to know, these laws will require county officials to waste their limited time and resources contacting voters. Furthermore, since the GOP wants to throw out absentee requests that have already been submitted, if these two county court decisions stand, it could create additional voter confusion among voters whose request submissions get invalidated.
• Texas: Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to stop officials in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is Texas' largest county, from mailing applications for absentee mail ballots to all 2.4 million registered voters for November. Paxton's lawsuit claims the county lacks the authority to do so and notes that many voters aren't even eligible to vote by mail under state law, which requires an excuse for voters under age 65 (though litigation over that requirement is ongoing). However, local officials in parts of the state have said during the pandemic that they cannot legally determine whether voters claiming a "disability" excuse were being truthful or not.
