Voting rights advocates are looking fearfully at early efforts by Republicans in legislatures across the country to reverse many of the 2020 ballot access easements inspired by the pandemic. But an exception to the trend looks to be blooming in deep blue Massachusetts.
The state's top elections official, Secretary of State Bill Galvin, said Tuesday that he will push to make permanent last year's temporary expansions of voting by mail and early in-person voting, which caused turnout in November to smash state records.
The announcement is a signal development because Galvin has developed significant clout among his fellow Democrats in lopsided control of the legislature during his 25 years in office, longer than any other statewide official.
His proposal would repeal the state's strict excuse requirements for obtaining an absentee ballot — which, like those in 11 other states, were suspended last year in order to promote turnout and protect voters from exposure to the coronavirus. At least seven of the others, all with GOP-majority legislatures, look very likely to resume making voters justify the need to vote by mail.
The easement worked as dramatically in Massachusetts as any other state, boosting the share of votes delivered in an envelope more than tenfold, from 3 percent in 2016 to 42 percent in November.
"While voting by mail may not always be used to the same extent as the pandemic finally ends, my office has heard from many voters who have made it clear that they want this option to remain available for all future elections," Galvin said.
Another 23 percent of the presidential election vote was cast in person before Election Day after the state extended that option's availability to two full weeks, including weekends, from the previous 11 weekdays. Galvin's bill would continue that timetable indefinitely, as well, while creating a new seven-straight-day window before the primaries and permitting municipalities to begin offering early voting in local elections.
The Brennan Center for Justice now counts 165 pieces of legislation introduced in 33 states as of Monday that would restrict future voting access — mainly by limiting mail-in ballots, implementing new voter ID requirements or curtailing registration. At this point a year ago, the progressive think tank says, there had been only 35 bills to curb voting proposed in 15 state capitals.)
The biggest legislative bursts this year have been in three states that Biden carried last fall but with legislatures controlled by the GOP: Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Far more measures, 541 of them, have been filed in the past month to expand voting access, Brennan says. But — unlike in Massachusetts — the bulk have been written by Democrats in legislatures firmly in GOP control.
The two relaxations of the rules in the Bay State boosted turnout to a record 73 percent, well above the national share of those eligible who voted and a 400,000-person increase from 2016 even though almost no contests on any ballot in the state were competitive. (President Biden locked in the 11 electoral votes by a margin of 30 points, extending the Democtratic streak in the state to nine.)
Galvin's legislative proposal would also make Massachusetts the 22nd state where eligible people can register and vote on Election Day. The cutoff for getting on the rolls is now 20 days ahead of time, one of the earliest deadlines in the country.
Legislation to do what the secretary of state wants has already been filed by two influential Democratic legislators, Sen. Cynthia Creem and Rep. John Lawn. "In these days of voter suppression we need to make it easier for people," Creem said.
Republicans, who hold just one of every six seats on Beacon Hill, say they are mainly concerned about the costs of continuing last year's easements. A handful also contended that the switch to no-excuse mail voting for 2020 was not allowed under the state constitutional, although in December they dropped a lawsuit pressing that argument.
"We have such phenomenal access to voting in Massachusetts," GOP Rep. Nicholas Boldyga told the Boston Herald. "Making mail-in ballots permanent — I know I'm not there yet. I think we have a long way to go and I don't think it's necessary going forward unless there are extreme circumstances like a pandemic."
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.