First State Times

A Delaware court ruled Wednesday that state law allowing universal mail-in voting is in direct violation of the state’s Constitution, which requires in-person voting on Election Day absent one of six specified excuses.

M. Jane Brady, chair of the state Republican Party and former Delaware attorney general, called the decision by the Delaware Chancery Court a “great victory” for voters and the integrity of the Constitution.

“With this law, the Legislature [Democratically controlled] was effectively taking complete control of the law governing elections,” Brady told First State Times. “They could have made any changes to the elections they liked.”

Brady’s law firm, the Brady Legal Group LLC, filed a lawsuit just hours after Gov. John Carney, a Democrat, signed the bill into law in late July – a signing that Brady said took place on a Friday in private to avoid press coverage.

Four years ago the Legislature tried to pass a constitutional amendment to allow for expanded mail voting but fell short of the votes needed.

Vice Chancellor Nathan Cook ruled that the law violated the Delaware Constitution by allowing voters to cast their ballots from a place other than their designated polling location without an excuse iterated in the Constitution.

“The plaintiffs argue that Article V, Section 4A of the Delaware Constitution, however, provides for absentee voting in certain enumerated circumstances,” Cook wrote in his opinion. “Our Supreme Court and this Court have consistently stated that those circumstances are exhaustive. Therefore, as a trial judge, I am compelled by precedent to conclude that the Vote-by-Mail Statute’s attempt to expand absentee voting to Delawareans who do not align with any of Section 4A’s categories must be rejected.”

Brady said that the other key part of the ruling is that it gave voters standing to bring the lawsuit, a legal status challenged by the Delaware Department of Elections, the defendant in the case. The voters Brady represented in the case were Michael Higgin, a candidate for state representative, and Michael Mennella, who has worked as an inspector on Election Day over the past eight election cycles.

Cook did uphold a provision in the bill that allowed for same-day voter registration.

The Department of Elections is likely to appeal the ruling overturning the universal mail ballot provisions, WMDT reports.

Co-counsel in the case was the Public Interest Legal Foundation.