When it comes to elections during the pandemic, Kentucky has stood apart in two ways. It instituted one of the nation's most restrictive voter identification laws just as the coronavirus was shutting government offices that issue ID cards, but its leaders also cut an unusual bipartisan deal resulting in one of the smoothest vote-by-mail primaries so far.
A civil rights group has now sued to make the state abandon that first move, but stick with the second, at least through the November election.
Filed Tuesday in state court, the lawsuit comes early in what's likely to become a flood of litigation to make voting for president easy and safe this fall. While most states have made accommodations for their primaries, they have not done so for the general election.
Many legislatures adjourned for the year before the resurgence of Covid-19 infections. Some governors with the power to change the rules on their own, in both parties, have not yet confronted their options, while many GOP governors seem ready to resist expanded voting by mail in light of President Trump's emphatic objections.
The suit in Kentucky, brought by the Fair Elections Center on behalf of four voters who say their fragile health will preclude them from going to the polls this fall, seeks to force the state to maintain the rules used for the June primary conducted mainly through the mail.
Under a deal between Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, the state's usual requirement of an excuse to vote absentee was suspended, and voters were informed by postcard they could request a mail ballot online and send it in two weeks before election day.
To accommodate people who decided they needed or wanted to vote in person, counties were required to have at least one polling place and open it several days ahead of time. That raised serious eyebrows when there was just one was set up in both Louisville and Lexington, but on primary day the facilities were generally described as efficient and the length of the lines manageable.
After the suit was filed, the governor's office said Beshear would support an indefinite extension of the primary regulations, while the secretary of state has declined to comment.
The two remain on opposite sides of the voter ID law. Adams helped to draft the measure this winter, saying it would enhance election security. It was enacted over a veto in March from Beshear, who said it would lead to voter suppression.
Either way, the suit maintains, "a pandemic is no time to impose a new requirement for identification that forces voters to enter government offices, have in-person interactions with election officials, and/or enter other public spaces to obtain a copy of their ID."
To keep the ID law but drop the mail voting easements, the suit says, would violate the state Constitution's mandate that "all elections shall be free and equal."
The arrangements for the primary were widely hailed as working as designed. More than a million votes were cast, four out of five by mail in a state that usually records fewer than 5 percent submitted that way because of the excuse rules. Thanks mainly to a high-profile Democrtatic Senate nomination contest, the turnout statewide was 29 percent, almost matching the record for a primary set a dozen years ago.
And the 4 percent share of mailed ballots that were rejected — mostly because the envelopes weren't signed or were mailed too late — was below the last two elections.
Trump can count on the 8 electoral votes from the state, which has reported more than 17,500 coronavirus cases and just over 600 deaths. And Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is the solid, if not prohibitive, favorite to secure a seventh Senate term despite an extraordinarily well-funded challenge from Democrat Amy McGrath, a Marine fighter pilot veteran who lost a House race two years ago.
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.