Spectrum News reports on the party-line vote in the state legislature that will adopt no excuse absentee voting in New York even though the state’s voters rejected an amendment to the state’s constitution that would do the same. The report quotes the executive director of Common Cause New York, Susan Lerner, as saying “not only is this absolutely legal under our constitution, but the right thing to do.” I’m not sure I agree that this is the wisest move, given the hyper-polarized, one-sided partisan distrust of vote by mail. Perhaps it would have been preferable to increase access to in-person early voting, to ensure ample opportunities for all to vote, until the current turmoil over vote by mail can calm down and more broadly bipartisan levels of support for no excuse vote by mail can return. Because New York is not a swing state, adoption of the Democratic Party’s preferred position on election administration over the unified opposition of Republicans–and contrary to the views of the electorate as a whole–may not make much of a difference to improving the conditions of conducting elections and, most crucially, accepting the legitimacy of valid election outcomes, nationally. But change on this front is likely to happen incrementally at the margins, and this strikes me as marginally making matters worse regarding the urgent need for increasing public trust in the validity of election results.

UPDATE: More on the relationship of this new bill to the defeated state constitutional amendment can be found in this Gotham Gazette story.