Proponents of expanded voting by mail during the pandemic won victories Monday in three states, two of them solid blue but one of them reliably red.
The top elections official in Alabama, a Republican, decreed that fear of the coronavirus would be reason enough to vote absentee for president this year. Vermont joined the handful of states that have decided to send return-by-mail ballots to all voters for the general election. And Connecticut's plans to open mail voting to everyone in next month's primary survived a GOP lawsuit.
The various decisions come as policymakers and courts across the country continue to deliberate proposals for separating Covid-19 from the voting booth — a problem that remains intense now that it's clear the nation's public health crisis will continue way beyond November.
Here are the details:
Alabama
GOP Secretary of State John Merrill went against the wishes of President Trump, who opposes expanded mail voting by saying without evidence that election fraud is a sure consequence. The state normally has strict excuse requirements to vote absentee, but Merrill expanded them for this month's primary runoff to include fear of Covid-19, which is surging in the state — and has now extended that decision until November.
"Amid coronavirus concerns, it is important to remember that Alabamians who are concerned about contracting or spreading an illness have the opportunity to avoid the polls on Election Day by casting an absentee ballot," he said.
Merrill's expansion of absentee balloting, which won praise from Democrats in Montgomery, salves the sting that voting rights groups in the state had suffered at the hands of the Supreme Court three weeks ago. The justices voted 5-4 to block a lower court order easing other mail voting restrictions that are complicated at any time — but especially during a public health crisis.
At least through municipal elections next month, the two rules that Judge Abdul Kallon of Birmingham had struck down will remain in force: A copy of a photo ID must be part of a voter's application for a ballot, and an affidavit signed by a notary public or two adult witnesses must accompany the ballot itself.
Vermont
The nation's smallest reliably Democratic state said it would mail a general election ballot to every active, registered voter starting Sept. 18, more than six weeks before Election Day.
Other than the five states that had planned to conduct all their elections by mail even before the pandemic, California appears to be the only other state that has adapted this aggressively to the ever-changing nature of the Covid-19 emergency.
Vermont's General Assembly earlier voted to give state officials the leeway to change election procedures. The details, announced by Secretary of State Jim Condos, will also allow for outdoor polling places as well as drive-through polling stations for the Aug. 11 primary and the November general election.
Town clerks will also be permitted to begin processing ballots a month ahead of time, to avoid delays and confusion by waiting until the election is over. Although no excuse has been required to vote by mail in the state in the past, only about 10 percent of Vermoters did so, so the rush of envelopes this fall will be unexpected.
Earlier this month the state sent postcards to all voters so they could request a mail-in ballot for the Aug. 11 primary — and a quarter of them have already done so.
Connecticut
The state Supreme Court cleared the way for widespread mail voting in the primary, also Aug. 11, by dismissing a lawsuit from four Republican congressional candidates who said Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont had exceeded his power by relaxing the state's very strict absentee ballot excuse requirements.
Chief Justice Richard Robinson, sitting alone, dismissed the case on procedural grounds. He did not rule directly on the question of whether only the Legislature may alter the rules for getting a mail ballot. Lamont in May had issued an executive order expanding — but only for the primary — the list of available reasons to include risk of Civic-19 exposure. The candidates said that amounted to a decision to "impose effectively no-excuse absentee voting."
Secretary of State Denise Merrill has already received 200,000 requests for absentee ballot applications — meaning from about one-sixth of the state's voters.
The candidates, two each running in two House districts, say they are part of a group called Fight Voter Fraud, which takes Trump's position that widespread absentee voting puts the reliability of elections at risk.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.