Previous Obama administration Solicitor General Don Verrelli has aided former president Joe Biden in his home state of Delaware in advancing free election rules there.
The looser the vote rules, the better, according to Biden, who has decried them as” Jim Crow 2.0″ in state like Georgia.
But Delaware — the president’s residence state — does n’t include general mail voting or similar- day registration, ever since the Delaware Supreme Court struck both procedures down as illegal in 2022. On Wednesday, the country’s highest court heard a case challenging the validity of Delaware’s first election period and permanent absent voting record, after a lower court found that both violated the state law.
As he once stated in 1977 while representing Delaware in the Senate, that a proposal like that” could lead to a serious increase in vote fraud,” he must have at one point acknowledged the risks of things like same-day voter registration. However, because Democrats rely on weak election laws to increase their chances of winning, protecting elections is no longer as appealing to Biden as it was in 1977.
So it’s interesting that a top official from the Obama administration, like Verrilli, was hired to challenge the state-level challenge, which is undoubtedly embarrassing for the president. Verrilli is perhaps best known for bringing up the cases in the Obamacare and Obergefell before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation ( PILF ) and former Delaware Attorney General Jane Brady argue that state laws that forbid early and permanent absentee ballots violate the Delaware Constitution on Wednesday. In 2019, the state legislature passed a law allowing early voting in person at least ten days before Election Day. The Superior Court overturned this law because it violated the state’s constitution, which mandated that the general election be held on November 1st, the following Monday.
According to a press release from PILF, the court determined that a 2010 state statute that allowed “permanent absentee status” violated the state’s constitution because” the constitution only permits absentee voting with strict eligibility restrictions,” the court concluded.
According to PILF, voters who are granted permanent absentee status can receive an absentee ballot each election year “without regard for the applicant’s eligibility in each subsequent election.”
Verrilli, on behalf of the state, argued that other states with similar constitutional provisions were not prevented from using methods like early and permanent absentee voting.
A number of left-wing attorneys general have also jumped on the bandwagon to fight the state’s laws, which have already been upheld by a lower court as being in violation of the state constitution.
The left-wing attorney general acknowledges that the Delaware Constitution specifically defines” Election Day” as the Tuesday following the first Monday of November in a press release from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who signed on to the amicus brief supporting the Delaware laws.
Bonta contends that the purpose of these loose election laws is to increases the “opportunity” for voters to “participate” in the electoral process.
However, as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood put it, “widespread, unsupervised mail-in voting gives left-wing groups a chance to get Democrats an advantage over Republicans on Election Day” as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood put it.
The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman is a correspondent for elections.
