Early in-person voting can begin in Texas earlier than usual next week, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, greenlighting the singular significant move by the state to make its election easier in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The justices rebuffed several top Republicans who sued to keep the polling places closed for another six days beyond Tuesday. They were furious that Gov. Greg Abbott, who's also Republican, issued an executive order this summer adding those days to the election calendar, arguing he'd violated a state law that voting in person could not start until Oct. 19.
Since voting by mail remains more restrictive in Texas than any other battleground state, and since there's no more "one punch" option for quickly casting a straight-party ballot, long lines at the polls are nearly assured. The added earlier days were designed to hold down the Election Day crowds in the nation's second most populous state, where the 38 electoral votes could fall either way and so could half a dozen congressional contests.
The suit was filed by state GOP Chairman Allen West, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and several members of the Legislature.
But the state's highest civil court, where Republicans hold all the seats, ruled 7-1 that the plaintiffs waited too late to sue and noted the election has already started because people are returning their absentee ballots. "To disrupt the long-planned election procedures as relators would have us do would threaten voter confusion," Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote for the majority.
But at the same time Wednesday, the same court as expected put the final nail in an effort by Harris County, the state's largest and a Democratic stronghold, to send unsolicited mail ballot applications to all of Houston's 2 million voters. State law does not leave any room for such a move, the justices ruled. (Mail voting in Texas is generally limited to those older than 64, the disabled and people out of town for the entire election season. But more than 200,000 applications have already been filed, double the county's usual total)
Harris is spending $27 million to expand voting access, including by tripling the number of early polling places and keeping seven of them open for all 24 hours of Oct. 29, the final day for early voting.
Last week Abbott reversed himself on another election easement he'd made and said there could be only one drop box for returning absentee ballots in each county — the six with more than a million people, the six bigger than 1,500 square miles and the other 242 as well. Lawsuits challenging that move had been filed in federal and state courts.
Democrats and voting rights groups have unsuccessfully pressed to ease voting on several other fronts — most prominently by allowing Texans to vote by mail by claiming fear of Covid-19 exposure as a reason, and by blocking the state law that ended straight-ticket voting. The latter move means more time at not-always socially distanced polling places.
While many counties have promised solid safety precautions at the polls, including plenty of sanitizer and mandated six-foot gaps between voters and poll workers alike, masks are encouraged but not required at polling places — one of the few exemptions in Abbott's statewide mask order.
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.