Everyone in Texas has a constitutional right to vote absentee because of the coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge has ruled.
The decision by Judge Fred Biery is the latest volley in what looks to be a protracted legal battle, in both state and federal courts, over who may avoid the possibility of viral infection at a Texas polling place this year. The fight is especially important because Texas is the second most populous state, a hotbed of hot contests this fall — and also among just a handful of states that have not relaxed stringent eligibility rules for voting by mail.
The ruling was among three fresh developments Tuesday in courthouses across the country, which have become the venue for dozens of fights between voting rights groups and conservative state governments over the rules for remote voting during a public health emergency. These are the details:
Texas
The decision by Biery, which begins with the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, provides a preliminary injunction while the pandemic is ongoing — allowing anyone trying to avoid the virus to obtain an absentee ballot for the July primary runoffs and the November election. Texas is one of 16 states with laws on the books requiring a specific excuse for people to absentee ballot, but a dozen of them have implemented workarounds this spring .
In Texas, one of the available excuses is a disability. The judge said that should apply to all registered voters who "lack immunity from Covid-19 and fear infection at polling places," which is similar to the view several state governments have taken.
A state court judge ruled similarly in a separate lawsuit last month, declaring the pandemic must allow voters to qualify for absentee ballots under the disability excuse. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed and threatened to prosecute election officials in the state's big cities who were starting to issue mail ballots without the usual excuses. And last week the state Supreme Court agreed to put a hold on expanded absentee voting until it considered the state's appeal
In another sweeping determination, Biery said another permissible excuse - being older than 65 - amounts to unconstitutional age discrimination against younger voters. Lawsuits pressing the same arguments are pending in several states where the elderly may always vote absentee but others may not.
One expert, Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, predicted the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals would overturn the ruling because its legal rationale was shaky.
Louisiana
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Fair Elections Center, suing the state on behalf of the League of Women Voters, asked a federal judge to declare unconstitutional the requirement that people have a specified excuse before using an absentee ballot in either the July presidential primary or local elections in august..
It also argues the requirement that a witness' signature be on an absentee ballot is unconstitutional, as are current rules that don't permit voters to fix any problems with their absentee ballots, such as failing to sign or date them properly.
The suit says the effect of all the rules is to discriminate against old and minority voters. Suits are working their way through the courts challenging similar absentee ballot regulations in several other states.
Minnesota
Another challenge to witness signature requirements on absentee ballots was filed by the League of Women Voters in federal court in St. Paul. The coronavirus pandemic means that people will be unconstitutionally forced to risk their health in order to get someone to come close enough to countersign their envelopes ahead of the statewide primaries Aug. 11, the lawsuit argues.
Michelle Witte, executive director of the league, said the requirement hits seniors and minority voters particularly hard. "The current law requiring an absentee ballot witness unnecessarily exposes them to greater risk of contracting this deadly virus," she said.
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.