While Obama DEI Judge Indiri Talwani in Boston was busy blocking Trump’s mail ballot verification order for the second time, two other courts delivered a pair of election integrity wins that should shape the fight going forward. The 5th Circuit restored nine provisions of Texas’s 2021 election law, and the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld witness signature requirements for absentee ballots. Both decisions reject the left’s core strategy for defeating election security: calling everything discriminatory and hoping a sympathetic judge agrees. The Texas ruling is the more significant of the two. U.S. District Judge Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee, writing for a unanimous panel, found that the organizations challenging Texas’s mail-ballot ID requirements lacked standing – they failed to show their members faced a substantial risk of future harm. More importantly, the court noted that ID-related ballot rejection rates had fallen dramatically under the challenged law, from roughly 11 to 12 percent down to 2.7 percent.
Think about that for a moment. The law that the left spent years calling voter suppression actually produced better outcomes for voters – fewer rejected ballots, more successful participation. The argument that requiring identification inevitably suppresses turnout collapsed against the actual data from Texas’s own elections. The court also held that local prosecutors who enforce election crimes are not themselves providers of voting services – meaning they can’t be sued for disability discrimination under the ADA on that theory. This closes off one of the left’s favorite litigation strategies: treating any enforcement of election law as a form of discrimination against disabled voters.
Election Integrity Standards Upheld
The Minnesota Supreme Court’s ruling is equally important in practice. Third-party ballot harvesters – people who collect and deliver other voters’ absentee ballots – must still comply with witness signature requirements. Election officials can still verify those requirements are met. Minnesota had rejected roughly 6,000 ballots at issue in the litigation for failing to meet these standards. The state court upheld the rejections. This is how election integrity is supposed to work. If you’re going to allow third parties to collect and deliver other people’s ballots – which itself creates enormous opportunities for coercion and fraud – the minimum you can do is verify that the witness signatures attached to those ballots are legitimate. The left calls this suppression. Courts are increasingly calling it law.
The broader pattern the left has been running deserves to be named explicitly. Federal disability law. The ADA. The Rehabilitation Act. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. These are legal tools that were designed to protect genuine civil rights – and they have been systematically weaponized to block any election security measure the left doesn’t like, regardless of whether the measure has anything to do with disability or race. Texas’s mail-ballot rejection rate dropped under the law the left called discriminatory. The law worked better, not worse. Courts noticed. The American people should too.
